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Wilderness essays
Nature symbolism in literature
Relationship between human being and nature
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Recommended: Wilderness essays
The Wilderness in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild
Journeys into the wilderness test far more than the physical boundaries of the human traveler. Twentieth century wilderness authors move beyond the traditional travel-tour approach where nature is an external diversion from everyday life. Instead, nature becomes a catalyst for knowing our internal wilderness and our universal connections to all living things. In Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain, and Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, “nature” mirrors each narrator: what the narrators ultimately discover in the wilderness reflects what needs they bring to it. Their points of view, expectations, and awareness all determine their experiences of the wild and “self.” Ultimately, however, each work reveals that the experience of nature need not be restricted only to “self-discovery,” but may well expand to an understanding of the spiritual “family self.”
Atwood’s psychological novel describes the return journey by its narrator from a self-centered, urban existence to the Canadian wilderness of her youth, where she finds the meaning of family and her role in it. Though not overtly psychological, Mary Austin’s intense devotion to the life and people of her desert community suggests these have become replacements for her own, unsuccessful attempts at conventional family life. Finally, Gary Snyder’s kinship with nature exemplifies a life integrated in all aspects—a union that merges the practical, psychological, and spiritual into what may be called the “cosmic” family.
Birth of Family
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing describes the heroine/narrator’s phy...
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...our experiences: the progress of our consciousness. This progress resolves issues of the self and one’s individual past, heals our psychic pain, and releases us from powerlessness and fear. By accepting the wilderness in ourselves we will understand the wilderness in each other and our connectedness. Nature functions as catalyst, as guide, as test, as teacher. Then opening the spiritual window to grace, we ultimately realize the possibility of being fully human.
References
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972).
Austin, Mary. Stories from the Country of Lost Borders. Ed. Marjorie Pryse (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987).
Pryse, Marjorie. "Introduction" to Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin. (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987).
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
From the prologue through chapter one in “Wilderness and the American Mind”, the author emphasizes the affect wilderness had on the Europeans during the colonization of America. In today’s society, we are familiar with the concept of wilderness but few of us have experienced the feeling of being encapsulated in the unfamiliar territory. Today we long for wilderness, crave it even. We use it as an outlet to escape the pace of life. However, we have a sense of safety that the Europeans did not. We are not isolated in the unfamiliar, help is usually a phone call away. Though we now view the wilderness as an oasis because we enter at our own terms, in the early colonial and national periods, the wilderness was an unknown environment that was viewed as evil and dangerous.
The epigraphs presented by Krakauer before each chapter of the memoir Into the Wild dive deep into the life of Chris McCandless before and after his journey into the Alaskan wilderness. They compare him to famous “coming of age characters” and specific ideas written by some of his favorite philosophers. These give the reader a stronger sense of who Chris was and why he made the decision to ultimately walk alone into the wild.
Pilcer, Sonia. "2G." Visions of America Personal Narratives from the Promised Land. Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. 4th ed. New York: Peresea Books, 1993. 201-206.
Borneman, Walter. The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
In the novel, A Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer, states that “every decision made by a young person is life decisive. What seems to be a small problem is really a large one. So everything that is done early in life is functionally related to a life trajectory” (Campbell). In mythic criticism, the critic sees mythic archetypes and imagery connecting and contrasting it with other similar works. Certain patterns emerge, such as a traditional hero on a journey towards self actualization. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer portrays this hero’s journey. The protagonist of the novel, Chris McCandless, hitchhikes to Alaska and walks alone into the wilderness, north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. He thought that the reality of the modern world was corrupt and uncompassionate, so he went on this journey in order to find a life of solitude and innocence that could only be expressed through his encounters with the wild. During this ambitious journey to find the true meaning of life, Chris McCandless exhibits a pattern like the type explained above. In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Chris McCandless follows this mythic pattern, seeking to be the traditional hero who spurns civilization, yet he discovers that modern heroes cannot escape their reality.
Ed. Mary McDonagh Murphy. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. 104-09. Print.
Sometimes a character may be pushed over the edge by our materialistic society to discover his/her true roots, which can only be found by going back to nature where monetary status was not important. Chris McCandless leaves all his possessions and begins a trek across the Western United States, which eventually brings him to the place of his demise-Alaska. Jon Krakauer makes you feel like you are with Chris on his journey and uses exerts from various authors such as Thoreau, London, and Tolstoy, as well as flashbacks and narrative pace and even is able to parallel the adventures of Chris to his own life as a young man in his novel Into the Wild. Krakauer educates himself of McCandless’ story by talking to the people that knew Chris the best. These people were not only his family but the people he met on the roads of his travels- they are the ones who became his road family.
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009. Rozema, Vicki. Voices from the Trails of Tears. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2003.
Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Immigrant America: A Portrait.” Kiniry and Rose 336-337. Print.
Davidson, James W., and Michael B. Stoff. The American Nation. Eaglewood Cliffs: Paramount Communications, 1995.
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. N.p., 2014. Print.
Into the Wild, written by John Krakauer tells of a young man named Chris McCandless who 1deserted his college degree and all his worldly possessions in favor of a primitive transient life in the wilderness. Krakauer first told the story of Chris in an article in Outside Magazine, but went on to write a thorough book, which encompasses his life in the hopes to explain what caused him to venture off alone into the wild. McCandless’ story soon became a national phenomenon, and had many people questioning why a “young man from a well-to-do East Coast family [would] hitchhike to Alaska” (Krakauer i). Chris comes from an affluent household and has parents that strived to create a desirable life for him and his sister. As Chris grows up, he becomes more and more disturbed by society’s ideals and the control they have on everyday life. He made a point of spiting his parents and the lifestyle they lived. This sense of unhappiness continues to build until after Chris has graduated college and decided to leave everything behind for the Alaskan wilderness. Knowing very little about how to survive in the wild, Chris ventures off on his adventure in a state of naïveté. It is obvious that he possessed monumental potential that was wasted on romanticized ideals and a lack of wisdom. Christopher McCandless is a unique and talented young man, but his selfish and ultimately complacent attitude towards life and his successes led to his demise.
In 1990, when he was 22 years old, Christopher McCandless ventured out into the Alaska wilderness in search for true happiness, and 2 years later he suffered a tragic death. An aspiring writer, Jon Krakauer, found McCandless’ story fascinating and chose to dedicate 3 years of his life to write a novel about him. The book entitled “Into the Wild” tells the tale of Christopher McCandless, an ill prepared transcendentalist longing for philosophical enrichment, who naïvely, failed to consider the dangers of isolating himself from human society for such a long period of time. Though Christopher McCandless made a courageous attempt to separate himself from society, in order to achieve self-fulfillment, the stubborn nature of this reckless greenhorn led him to his unfortunate demise.
5. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984.
Bass, Randall. "Borders as Barriers: Otherness and Difference." Bordertexts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 205-210.