Character Analysis: Chris Mccandless

Improved Essays
Deepan Patel
December 9, 2016
Period: 2
ERWC
Mr. Taylor
Into the Wild Essay
Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer, is about a young man from a rich family who hitchhiked to Alaska and walked all the way into the wilderness. Chris McCandless shows many personality traits. Chris is very intelligent in school, he is very strong willed, he is rebellious in his own ways, he doesn't like it when someone gives him advice or tells him what to do, and he is self involved, he is also very idealistic. He gets all these personality traits from his dad. He wanted to leave society and just be himself. Yet other things he does separates him from others around him. His unique attitude makes him who he is and what he has become.
Chris McCandless gets his intelligence
…show more content…
“Hell no…how I feel myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules” (Krakauer 6). Despite knowing the rules of the government McCandless opposes this. He does not feel the rules apply to him and he continues to do only what he feels. His mind has made his own rule book by which he lives his life. Not only did Chris like to do things in his own way, but also he resisted any sort of instruction he was given by others. “Even if you try to coach him, or to polish his skill to bring out that final 10 percent, he brought up that wall” (Krakauer 111). Even though someone might be telling him, to improve his skill or talent he resisted instruction of any kind. Such as when Walt tries to teach him racquetball he listens to the advice but he doesn't follow it because of his rebellious …show more content…
He doesn’t care about what other people think, just as long as he achieves what he is after. For example he left his parents house to go live in the Alaskan wilderness. “McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. He has a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, “that mattered”. He possessed grand – some would say grandiose – spiritual ambitions” (Krakauer 182). Chris believes the only way his life would be meaningful is if he did exactly what he is after. His strong willed nature is also shown when Chris leaves without telling anyone about his plans. He believes that he doesn’t need to tell anyone because he “will not run into anything that he can’t deal with” ( Krakauer 6). McCandless has such a strong will that he doesn't really think about the negative aspects of

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    McCandless went out into the wild with no backup plan or way to get out easily, should something go wrong, and that ultimately led to his death. When Gallien drops off Chris, he tries to give Gallien his watch: "I don't want to know what time it is, I Don't want to know what day it is or where I am. none of that matters (Krakauer 7). This statement is the first statement to fully explain that McCandless wants to wing it as much as he can and not care where he ends up. When McCandless comes across the river, he looks around and realizes he won't get across, as a result, he turned around and headed back to the bus.…

    • 678 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “McCandless was something else--although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps” (85). Even with the multiple comparisons Chris is different and the reader is left to decide whether he is unique or if he is “just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there”…

    • 729 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Chris Mccandless Selfish

    • 428 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Chris McCandless was both intelligent, but he was also lacking common sense, he also enjoyed people but wanted to be alone. Although there are many other traits that Chis/Alex holds that also have an opposite to it. Krakauer created Chris as a very paradoxical character, making it confusing why he made the decision to go to Alaska.…

    • 428 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Chris Mccandless Quotes

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Chris McCandless was a person who wanted to escape civilization and the problems in the real world. He didn't want any communication with his family. Chris Mccandless…

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    (157). McCandless seemed to be content with being on his own when it came to doing something he wanted to do. He did not need to rely on anyone for the things he wanted to do, he just made them happen, hence why he dropped everything to go on his journey into the wild. Krakauer uses many different things to help the readers figure out McCandless’s motives, but the letters do not give it straight forward. One must interpret the language used in the epigraph to figure out the theme of the chapter to help with finding the…

    • 1474 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the book there were mentions of people who were met to their end by unluckiness and such, that there were connections made about them and Chris. “Like Rosellini and Waterman, McCandless was a seeker and had an impractical fascination with the harsh side of nature,” (85). Which further goes into what and who I think Chris McCandless was; an idealist. There was also a part where in the book it says, “And unlike McCunn, he didn’t go into the bush assuming someone would automatically appear to save his bacon before he came to grief,” (85) Chris again, knew what he was getting into to. He didn’t need to worry if someone was going to rescue him or not.…

    • 725 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    His actions were not honorable and his decisions were those of a child. As a young headstrong man filled with hubris, he entered the harsh bush with little preparation. Running away from civilization, McCandless was like many other young men and women who travel to Alaska. He was disoriented, exasperated with societal prospects, probing for an adventure and a peregrination that would provide enlightenment.. An edifier from the Arctic circle expressed his noetic conceptions on McCandless, “I’ve run into several McCandless types out in the country… idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble.…

    • 1649 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Krakauer strives to ideally display the type of person Chris was, rather than the “reckless narcissist” or “noble idealist” outsiders viewed him as. For example, the author uses complex sentence structures to show the complexity of Chris: “Didn’t matter what it was, he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain, and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole- jobs where you’d get so damn dirty you couldn’t even tell what you looked like at the end of the day” (Krakauer 18). Chris was always making situations harder than they needed to be, which is a constant theme throughout the book. However, Chris is extremely intelligent and was always questioning life and creating challenges for himself, some of which may have been too challenging. In any case, Chris’s perspective on life was difficult for people to understand, but Krakauer creates an arranged, syntactic viewpoint of the raw existence Chris longed…

    • 891 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    McCandless wasn't some feckless slacker, adrift, and confused, racked by existential despair. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose." (187). Krakauer emphasizes the good within McCandless, stating that all of his actions were deliberate and meaningful. By using extreme wording such as “even a modicum” and “feckless slacker”, Krakauer clearly distinguishes Chris from the regular man.…

    • 754 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He tries to reason with his readers and show that there is more to see beyond your first impression, instead of a rebellious teenager who wants to go against social norms Krakauer shows this by a logos strategy. “On weekends, when his high school pals were attending ‘keggers’ and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting way they might improve their lives” (113). This quote suggests that McCandless is selfless and non judgemental. As well as being caring, McCandless was a free spirit. “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.…

    • 1093 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To crave is to feel a powerful desire for something. This is an emotion each and every human has known. Much of the time as individuals mature, they experience a craving for a sense of their own identity. Into the Wild is a non fiction book by Jon Krakauer about Christopher McCandless and his journey as he discovered who he was, independently from his family. For the majority of his youth Chris idolized non-conformist authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, and Leo Tolstoy who influenced his development and beliefs.…

    • 933 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Thesis For Into The Wild

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages

    However, judging from his last writings and photographs one can only infer he died content. Whether he was truly happy, one can 't know for his writings prove otherwise. McCandless story teaches us that we can learn to live through taking risks and being courageous. One needs to live in reality and see things for what they are or who the are. For if we don 't, we face the consequence of of being a sleeper as Thoreau calls them.…

    • 1202 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is a biography. A young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless takes a journey to Alaska to get away from the society and people in his life, like his family. Chris goes to Alaska with no money and the bare necessities to survive in the wilderness. Chris dies because he ended up needing the items he did not have, but Chris did and experienced a lot before he died. Chris makes an identity, which is being stubborn, ungrateful, and only depends on himself and that changes his life and his choices, Chris built his identity by his actions, interest, and values and beliefs.…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Christopher Mccandless Hero Analysis

    • 764 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 4 Works Cited

    Instead of following social norms and living how society, his parents, and those around him told him to, Chris ventured out into the world on his own to live his life by his own rules. Chris did not care what other people thought of him and he did not want to live the way society taught him to. By rejecting money, cars, maps, and other things that could have kept him alive, he proved himself to be an independent and adventurous young man. “I can almost understand why he rejected maps, common sense, conventional wisdom and local knowledge before embarking on his venture. Occasionally when I hear others make fun of Christopher McCandless, I fall quiet” (Sherry Simpson).…

    • 764 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 4 Works Cited
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Chris McCandless’ actions can be seen as rebellious at first, but as time goes on, it is clear that there is hostility between his parents and himself that he does not want to face or try to fix. In a dysfunctional family, there are two extremes when it comes to the outcome of the children: the rebel or the conformist. Although the older child is typically the conformist and the younger child is the rebel, the McCandless family is a little different because both children are the rebels. Krakauer says, “Also like Chris, she clashed fiercely with Walt and Billie as an adolescent… [but] Carine made peace with her parents shortly after Chris disappeared” (129).…

    • 1424 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays