Jon Krakauer, Selections from Into the Wild

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:  

1. Jon Krakauer is telling the story of Chris McCandless, who was interested in, among other things, recording the adventures of "Alexander Supertramp." What is the relationship between McCandless and Supertramp? What does writing under a different name allow McCandless to do that he wouldn't otherwise be able to do?  

2. Most everyone at one time or another has dreamed of getting away from it all. Chris McCandless actually did so. Would he have been able to have the adventure he was looking for if he'd done more research? Would his story be more or less compelling if he had brought along a map? If he had survived?  

3. One of Krakauer's central concerns in Into the Wild is to determine what drove McCandless to embark on such a dangerous journey and to speculate on what McCandless's motives were when he sought to make his way back out of the wild. How does Krakauer go about trying to uncover the answers to these questions? What is his method? What counts as evidence for him? When does Krakauer know-or feel-that he has found what he was looking for?  

Questions for Writing:  

1. At the end of this reading, Krakauer asserts that one reason adults have so much difficulty understanding McCandless's actions is that they struggle "to recall how forcefully [they] were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth." To understand this observation, one must be able to define what "the passions and longings of youth" are. What do these passions and longings have to do with escape? With the natural world? And if one can recall such passions and longings, how might this change one's understanding of the import of McCandless's death?  

2. In providing a narrative of McCandless's journey, Krakauer draws on the writings Chris left behind in the blank pages and margins of his books and on the walls of the bus where he spent his final months. What does all this writing tell Krakauer about McCandless's motives for heading off into the wild? Is it possible to escape from civilization in the twenty-first century? Does it make sense to try?  

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. In "The Naked Citadel," Susan Faludi sets out to study how young men are turned into soldiers at a military academy and to record how this training process was upended when the academy was required to admit young women into its ranks. In detailing McCandless's journey into the wild, Krakauer provides a glimpse into another ritualized way of "becoming a man." Would you argue that McCandless's journey is consistent with The Citadel's efforts to create a certain kind of man? Or was McCandless's journey an attempt to escape from the masculine ideals embodied by The Citadel's students? What, if anything, do these two stories suggest about how masculinity will be defined and experienced in the twenty-first century?

2. Toward the end of this reading, Krakauer cites the cultural ecologist Paul Shepard’s observations about how the nomadic Bedouin relates to the natural world. According to Shepard: “The nomadic Bedouin does not dote on scenery, paint landscapes, or compile a nonutilitaram natural history . . . . [H]is life is so profoundly in transaction with nature that there is no place for abstraction or esthetics or a ‘nature philosophy’ which can be separated from the rest of his life.” This, Krakauer argues, is the kind of relationship with nature that McCandless achieved at the end of his travels. And yet, with Leila Ahmed’s discussion of Egyptian history in mind, what are we to make of the fact that Chris sought to embrace an approach to nature that international politics has largely succeeded in restricting to the very margins of society? Is Chris’ retreat from civilization essentially a project for the privileged? While the meaning of “Arab” was once restricted “only to the inhabitants of Arabia and to Bedouins of the region’s deserts,” what are we to make of the fact that the meaning of Arab has changed so dramatically in the past fifty years? Are the Arabs that Ahmed describes fleeing the very world that Chris sought to embrace?

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