Jon Krakauer writes the infamous book Into the Wild. It’s a great book about a young man named Chris McCandless who changed his name to Alex and goes into the wild because he despised materialism.

Krakauer writes the book in a way that it is a book written about different people who desired the similar things Alex did and even tried it. He himself is also in one of the stories he tells.

However, his goals were not only to tell Alex’s story. He wrote the book to convince his audience to step away from society’s materialism just like the characters of his book did.

He took a great approach by, like I said before, making the whole book about people like Alex. And one of those people was Jon Krakauer himself. Instead of just telling his readers to do one thing without doing actually doing anything about it, he also told the story of how he himself took part in that action as well.

For example, if someone shouts at me to stop shouting at people our of anger, there isn’t much credibility. However, if I know that someone is not someone who shouts out of anger, then that’s a whole different story. That someone is not a hypocrite and actually has the right to tell me that.

Another thing Krakauer does is giving Alex’s endeavor credibility by not being the only one talking about him. Other people in the story also talk about how golden Alex was and the readers could lucidly tell that he had made such a great impact on the people he encountered. Like Ron, the man who became an atheist after finding out about Alex’s death.

For example,  if a boy who likes a girl explains about her, he’s bound to only mention the good things because he is biased towards her. However, if we get from other people about how great of a person she is, it will give us another point of view, possibly a view we can trust and believe as well.

Through this, Krakauer establishes a great argument. However, he is not fully able to convince his readers that giving up materialism is the road to the living because most of the people he mentioned end up dying. And through all the death that happened because of the pursuit of the life of the wild the readers are exposed to, the readers finish the book with the doubt of if that is actually the true way of living.

Word of the Day: tristful
(adj.) deeply yet romantically melancholy

2 thoughts on “Krakauer

  1. Hanny I really like your post! I love how you explain your views on how different people can give us different perspectives. I also enjoyed hearing your insight on Into the Wild. I would encourage you to make sure that the way you word your scentences is clear, for example, “Krakauer writes the book in way that it is a book written about different people who desired the similar things Alex did and even tried it” was slightly confusing. Overall you did a great job and I look forward to reading your future blog posts.


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