Comparing Emerson, Mccandless, And Thoreau

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,” is a quotation stated by Emerson that effectively described the transcendental era. Transcendentalism was a time when non-conformists critiqued the traditional ways of the Age of Reason and adopted the innovative and imaginative ideals of the Romanticism era. Emerson, Thoreau, and McCandless adopted three essential values of the era: individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature in differing ways. To start off, individualism was a major ideal of living, for each of the men. In his essay, Self-Reliance, Emerson stated, “Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string,” (Emerson 210) which describes an essential value that Emerson, McCandless, and Thoreau believed in; because with a self-motivated mindset and self-confidence, they were able to able listen to their instincts, mind, and heart without concern of

This point is expressed when McCandless states, “Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road... Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild” (Krakauer 163). Compared to Emerson and Thoreau, McCandless is more impulsive with his actions, and is unequivocally the extremist of the three. McCandless explores a variety of nature as he hikes through the woods, climbs mountains, crosses rivers, etc., while Thoreau embraced nature when he created a home for himself in the woods. Thoreau learned his surrounding, what species of animals lived near, and grew bountiful rows of beans. While Thoreau intentions of living in the woods was an experiment to see if one could “find themselves” in nature's, McCandless “into the wild” experience was a journey for