Alternative Lifestyles in Krakauer's Into the Wild and Thoreau's Civil Disobedience

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Recommended: Comparing Thoreau And Chris McCandless ITW

After reading Krakauer and Thoreau I have learned about an alternative lifestyle that was brought to light by both of these writers. Both of these men write about a life of minimalism and the act of self-reliance. Through Thoreau's writing about his own life in Walden and his essay "Civil Disobedience" and the story of Chris McCandless told by Krakauer in his book Into the Wild we learn about two similar but at times very different viewpoints on the subject. I would like to compare the two lifestyles and show how different the lifestyle of McCandless was to Thoreau and ultimately prove that the actions of McCandless were careless and eventually led to his death in the wilderness of Alaska.

When starting to compare both of the above-mentioned minimalists, it's necessary to get an idea of what the term means in regard to these two men. Both of these men decided to step away from the material world at one point and live a life of self-reliance. But the mean did so in two very different ways. One man left all he had behind and traveled the country preparing to embark on his dream trip to the Alaskan wilderness. The other planned a two-year experiment that put him in a cabin he built a mile or so out of town to see if he could survive on his own.

Thoreau put those two years on paper as he wrote his book Walden. Thoreau states: "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months"(7). Through his writing, Thoreau documents his time spent on Walden Pond and informs the rea...

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...t the life he led was not that of nature and minimalism, but that of immaturity and not being able to deal with the social aspects of life. I think the goal of McCandless was more suicidal then self-exploration. I believe he knew he would not make it out of the wild. If his life could be explained in song, I think the words of Jerry Garcia in Brokedown Palace describe the life of McCandless. "Goin' home, goin' home, by the riverside I will rest my bones, Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul.

Works Cited

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003.

Conrad, Randall. "Indexing a Classic: Threau's fully annotated Walden." Key Words. 12 (December 2004): 137-40, 142.

Garcia, Jerry. Brokedown Palace. 1970. Warner, 1970.

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