The Emulator

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We live in a volatile and temperamental world, always succumbing to the whims of a puppeteer society. Our everyday lives are filled with quotas from slogans spewed forth by puppeteers who seek to enroll us in a utopian world...be all that you can be...never give up...you can do anything you set your mind to. Even our everyday dialogue is influenced by the wit of television and radio stars, and the censorship of a biased media. In Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, biographized Christopher J. McCandless seeks to alienate from his world. Chris McCandless gives up all materials and any relationship he has with the world, including his emancipation from his parents. Through this unheard of logic, he seeks to find a new kind of solace and way of living. But as much as Christopher wants us to believe that his odyssey promotes him as a pioneer, a more complex dissection reveals that he is in fact an emulator.

McCandless' journey is not a novel act. In 1934, a youth by the name of Everett Reuss disappeared in the Davis Gulch area - a series of caves and mountain ranges alongside the intersection of the Colorado River and the Escalante River in Utah. Reuss had been going on his own odyssey, trekking across the United States for many years. Like McCandless, he had been very vocal, opinionated, and stubborn to seek his way. In many ways, McCandless's journey is a mirror image of Reuss's journey several decades earlier. Like Reuss, McCandless changed his name to a pseudonym, and etched his newfound moniker in cave walls, tree trunks, and other platforms. Krakauer writes, "'NEMO 1934', he scrawled, no doubt moved by the same impulse that compelled Chris McCandless to inscribe `Alexander Supertramp/May 1992' on the wall of the Sus...

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...the latter years of his life through inherited ideals and views. Chris McCandless was a very bright individual, but he lived his life according to what his surroundings molded for him. He would have liked to be completely free of a materialistic world, free from a predetermined state, but his decision to find a new nirvana out in the wild uncannily referred back to the voyage of Everett Reuss and to the ideals set forth by his idolized authors. Chris McCandless was successful in alienating himself from the materialistic views of our contemporary world - burning his cash, donating his money to charity - but in the end, he made a plan for himself that had already been predetermined. Christopher J. McCandless was many things, and his journey was both extravagant and intriguing, but he is no pioneer. McCandless could not completely alienate himself from society.

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