"HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."
-Chris McCandless
Jon Krakauer establishes credibility for his writing by using experiences from his own life to relate the journey of a boy that took very similar risks but had a very different outcome.
Jon Krakauer
The picture to the left shows the author of "Into the Wild," Jon Krakauer.
At age 23, a year younger than the age of Chris McCandless at his death, Krakauer had his own Alaskan experience. He climbed Devils Thumb and the only difference between his expedition and Chris' was that Krakauer survived. Krakauer uses ethos by giving his own experiences from his expedition in Alaska to add credibility to his writing and to his own perspective and understandings of Chris. It also helps the reader to make their own inferences by drawing connections between the two very similar ,but also different, experiences and people. |
After the death of Chris in Alaska, Jon Krakauer and his two friends retraced Chris' steps to get a sense of who Chris was and to better understand the circumstances of his death. Krakauer also visited all the people Chris had met with to learn more about him. This is including his entire family and those who met Chris in his travels.
Krakauer's Personal View of McCandless
Krakauer makes his opinion very clear to the reader but he does not try to force the reader into agreeing with him because he even criticizes himself in parts of the book. In one chapter he includes responses to his article for Outside magazine that criticize the publicity of Chris and he even discredits his original claim in Into The Wild about the way Chris died in an additional chapter added years after the book was initially published.
"McCandless wasn't some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose" (184).
"In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die" (156).
"And he was fully aware when he entered the bush that he had given himself a perilously slim margin of error. He knew precisely what was at stake" (182).