When he is initially removed from Judge Miller's house in Santa Clara Valley, he is given his first exposure to the wild where, "every moment life and limb were in peril" (London 31). But soon he finds himself not entirely ready to leave civilization and answer the call of the wild, because he must first experience love. Buck establishes a relationship with John Thornton, and "love, genuine passionate love, was his for the fir... ... middle of paper ... ...e with his family name, Chris McCandless. Buck and McCandless had two very distinct experiences with their journey to answer the call of the wild because the wild was different for each of them. However both had to sacrifice their comfort zone to successfully answer the call.
Thoreau went into the woods for many different reasons than McCandless. He decided to live in the woods so he could live deliberately. He desired to learn what life had to teach him and face only the essential facts of life without any other distractions. Going into the woods, would let him know that he had lived, so when he died, he wouldn’t regret never fully living. He wanted to figure out if this life in nature was mean or sublime.
Ike is slowly becoming not only a man but also a hunter. He loves the wilderness and has gone into the woods with nothing except his close and come back out fine, This is to prove though that even in his youth Ike is a great hunter and that it is his right to kill the bear and not anyone elses, however Faulner decided that Boon should kill the bear. Boon ends up killing the bear that everyone thought was invincible with a knife which seems very much the way a real hunter would have done it, this shows that Boon in his own way is a hunter and not a straggler who just hangs around the camp for free drink. Since boon killed the bear, he becomes insane and once more becomes a pygmy as Faulkner says. Someone who is afraid of the woods and kills with the intent to kill not eat.
In Roberts article called “Jon Krakauer + Sean Penn: Back Into the Wild”, Roberts quotes Krakauer’s original magazine article that talks to the hunters that found Chris’s body. "The kid didn't know what the hell he was doing up here” The hunters did not personally know Chris and did not meet him in person and they could tell by evidence only that Chris McCandless was not suited to live in the Alaskan Wilderness. Seeing that Chris did not have a sturdy relationship with his father, he was driven by anger to go out to the Alaskan wilderness, he may have survived this adventure, or ev... ... middle of paper ... ...s was smarter he would have thought about his preparation, his motivation, and the possibility that he was mentally ill. I do not fully blame Chris because his friends and family could have prevented him from going. If they saw that he could possibly have a mental illness, then they could have forbidden him to go and would have saved his life.
Ed proves he is hunting for pride and for the respect of his friends when he says, "I might as well make some show of doing what I said I had come for" and " All I had really wanted was to stay away a reasonable length of time, long enough for the others to wake and find me gone […]. That would satisfy honor" (95). Ed is a city boy dissatisfied with work and love and to compensate he goes on this trip against his better judgment. The four suburbanites have no business being in the forest, the only one that has made a habit of hunting is Ed's friend Lewis.
Krakauer uses the life and death of Chris McCandless to convey that humans need to explore nature in order to discover the meaning of life. When McCandless first embarked on his journey, he believed that he needed to get rid of all his material possessions to get the most out of life. For example, in one of his first journal entries, McCandless wrote that he was better off experiencing the wild without camera because memories and experiences gave life meaning. From a Platonic perspective, cameras can only capture a fraction of reality and pictures are simply representations of a real event. By refusing to bring a camera, McCandless made a powerful and Platonic statement about materialism.
An Intentional Death Although everyone must explore and be adventurous to find who they are, they should do it in a rational way. In my point of view Chris McCandless was suicidal when he decided to enter the wild. John Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild, led us to believe through the shaved clean cut pictures of Chris that he was going to come home. However, I believe Chris did not intend to come home because of his unreasonable thinking and his unwillingness to prepare himself for the wild. In order to survive in the wild you must be prepared for any hardships and problems which occur.
It is hard to piece together the beliefs that a Realist person has versus the beliefs of a Transcendentalist has. The book contains both philosophies about them but the book itself portrays more of a Transcendentalist feel to it. The author portrays himself as a Realist, he may be known to write about nature, outdoors, but he has a different outlook. In the book, Into the Wild written by Jon Krakauer talks about a young man named Chris McCandless who decides to walk alone into the wilderness in Alaska to invent a new life for himself. He then struggles to make it out on his own and his body is found inside a bus.
Finding your true self in a complicated world is the theme of many stories, and The Bear and Barn Burning are no exceptions. In The Bear, the main character, whom remains nameless, finds himself in a forest, alone, and faced with a tough decision. Sarty, the main character from Barn Burning, finds his true self, alone, having just faced a tough decision, in the wilderness, much like the other boy. Even though both boys faced some obstacles they learned skills from each of their experiences. Sarty learned he must get away from his family to live a good life, and the other boy learned the hunt and track like men twice his age.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” In other words, he went into the woods to learn how to live with a purpose that was different from the commonly held believe that life is meant to be lived in order to progress society. By embracing the answers that nature had to give, he relocated how to live with the essential facts of life, rather than what society has promoted such as money and possessions. This led into another example of the lack of independence of thought produced by the people of society. “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for the