Into the Wild: Lea Carroll

Lea Carroll

Title of the Book: Into the Wild

Author: Jon Krakauer

# of pages: 203

Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

Review:

Jon Krakauer’s novel explores the adventures of Chris McCandless, which are filled with love and happiness through the people he meets, and experiences he has.  This book started from Krakauer’s news article from The Outsider and then transformed to a piece in which Krakauer adds some of his own narration and connections while also telling the story of McCandless.  Krauker follows Chris’s journeys through the wilderness and recounts the people he meets on the way to create a story that portrays the importance of nature and finding happiness.

            This book in unique because of the way that Krakauer writes it.  He is the narrator and thus he includes many of his own stories, like climbing Devil’s Thumb, but also illustrates Chris’s adventures as if he was there.  This seems that is would be a difficult book to write because Krakauer has pictures and journals to piece together Chris’s life, but he wasn’t there with him in the wilderness.  There is a lot of inference that Krakauer had to do in order to create this novel, which he successfully did.  In the author’s note, Krakauer explains that he includes parts of his own story in an attempt to “throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless” (Krakauer 2). 

One of the most memorable quotes in the book is the very last line: “…Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God” (Krakauer 199).  This describes the last photograph that McCandless took and shows that he was at peace and was happy with the wilderness around him.  Another memorable moment from the novel was in Chapter Nine when Krakauer describes the adventures of other explorers, like Everett Ruess, in an attempt to create parallels with McCandless.  Krauker also describes that monks arriving in Iceland in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. where drawn across storms and oceans because of a “hunger of the spirit” (97) and that “courage…reckless innocence and the urgency of their desire” can be parallels to McCandless and Ruess.  This is a memorable scene in the novel because it shows the hunger for the wilderness that McCandless had and the courage it took for him to follow that hunger. 

This novel is a great book for someone who enjoys the outdoors and can appreciate nature.  I would recommend this novel because it shows the lasting impact that people could have on those that they meet and the romantic qualities of the outdoors.