Jon Krakauer: American Writer and Journalist

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Jon Krakauer, American writer and journalist, was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1954. He is also a mountaineer, his father having exposed him to the craft when he was eight years old, thus igniting his life-long passion. In 1977, a year after he graduated from Hampshire College, Krakauer pioneered a new route to the Devil's Thumb, a treacherous mountain in southeastern Alaska. This endeavor was his first major foray into mountain climbing. In 1996, Krakauer chronicled an adventure at the Stikine icecap, in which he employed a route never before attempted, in one of his novels, Into the Wild.

Since his excursion to the Devil’s Thumb, Krakauer has not climbed, instead pursuing writing. In spite of that, when Outside Magazine asks him to pen an exposé about the commercialism on Mount Everest, he agrees without hesitation. In 1996, Krakauer enlisted on the May expedition, unaware the season would be so turbulent as to claim twelve lives - four being his own teammates- in a murderous storm that engulfs and ravages Everest. Fortunately, he successfully summits and descends the mountain. H...

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    Chapter 7: In chapter 7 Krakauer talks about how Everest has changed from a professionals trek to anyone's trek. He explains that many inexperienced people have climbed Mount Everest with the help of sherpas and guides. He also mentions about the determination of Everest and how in some instances in history people who weren't allowed into Tibet or Nepal but they snuck in and managed to climb and summit Everest

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  • Comparing Chris McCandless, Jon Krakauer and Everett Ruess

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    Krakauer also adored what nature had in store for his yearning for intriguing natural events. In is youth, he “devoted most of [his] waking hours to fantasizing about, and then undertaking, ascents of remote mounts in Alaska and Canada” (134). Shown by the time he spent dreaming, people can infer him as a person who deeply admires nature. At the age of eighteen, Ruess dreamed of living in the wilderness for the sake of fascination. He wandered to find events that could surprise him until his near death, in which he decided to find the more ...

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  • Krakauer’s Belief in McCandless

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    The day is unlike any other. The mail has come and lying at the bottom of the stack is the favored Outside magazine. The headline reads, “Exclusive Report: Lost in the Wild.” The cover speaks of a twenty four year old boy who “walked off into America’s Last Frontier hoping to make sense of his life.” The monotony of the ordinary day has now vanished from thought as Jon Krakauer’s captivating article runs through the mind like gasoline to an engine. The article is not soon forgotten, and the book Into the Wild is happened upon three years later. The book relates the full story of Christopher Johnson McCandless and how he left his family and friends after graduating college in order to find himself. Krakauer based the book off of his article on McCandless that was printed in January of 1993. From the time of writing the article to the printing of Into the Wild, Krakauer was obsessed with the tale of the boy who rid himself of society and later turned up dead in the Alaskan frontier. In the foreword of Into the Wild, Krakauer describes McCandless as “an extremely intense young man [who] possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence” and who was in deed searching for a “raw, transcendent experience” (i-ii). Krakauer is correct in assessing this conclusion about McCandless. This conclusion is seen throughout the book in many different assessments. Krakauer uses logical appeal, a comparison to his own life, and assumption to bring about his assessment of McCandless’ life.

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  • Chris Mccandless's Death In Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

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    Since publishing the book, McCandless has become an immense presence in Krakauer’s life and writings. “Into the Wild” eventually earned a National Bestseller ranking. The profits of his National Bestseller have no doubt benefitted him as well. “Into the Wild” is often discussed and studied in High Schools and Colleges. The book has become so popular with these learning institutions is in part its controversial nature, and the transcendentalist overtones. Krakauer is able to provide his ethos in the article by indicating his authority on all things

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  • Labeling of McCandless in Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild

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    By comparing Krakauer’s own life experiences and other peoples too to McCandless, he gave a little perspective and demonstrated that the negative remarks of many people were not correct for someone else had performed the same thing. Krakauer compared his youth mistakes to Chris McCandless by appealing to pathos since many other adolescents make them as well. First of all, Krakauer warned the reader, “I interrupt McCandless story with fragments…from my own youth…I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless,” (Krakauer’s note). He stated there that he ‘hopes’ to make a better presentation of McCandless’s life for he wanted to show that he deserves respect. He mirrored his own experiences and explained why he did it to draw some conclusion on why McCandless did it as well. Krakauer also said that he threw some ‘oblique light’ meaning that he attempted to make him appear better for he thought that Chris McCandless had to be a valued guy. A quote that proves the ‘oblique light’ that Krakauer threw was when he said, “Edwards regarded climbing as a “psycho-neurotic tendency”; he climb not for sport but to find refuge from the inner torment that framed his existence” (Krakauer 135). Krakauer wrote about this ...

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    When Jon Krakauer published a story about the death of a young man trekking into the Alaskan frontier in the January 1993 issue of Outside magazine, the audience’s response to Christopher McCandless’s story was overwhelming. Thousand of letters came flooding in as a response to the article. Despite the claims, especially from the native Alaskans, questioning McCandless’s mental stability and judgement, it soon becomes clear that McCandless was not just "another delusional visitor to the Alaskan frontier" (4). As Krakauer retells the life of Christopher McCandless and gives his own take on the controversy around McCandless’s death in Into The Wild, the reader also creates his own opinion on both McCandless and Krakauer’s argument. Krakauer

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  • Into the Wild: Chris McCandless is a Tragic Hero

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    Jon Krakauer, fascinated by a young man in April 1992 who hitchhiked to Alaska and lived alone in the wild for four months before his decomposed body was discovered, writes the story of Christopher McCandless, in his national bestseller: Into the Wild. McCandless was always a unique and intelligent boy who saw the world differently. Into the Wild explores all aspects of McCandless’s life in order to better understand the reason why a smart, social boy, from an upper class family would put himself in extraordinary peril by living off the land in the Alaskan Bush. McCandless represents the true tragic hero that Aristotle defined. Krakauer depicts McCandless as a tragic hero by detailing his unique and perhaps flawed views on society, his final demise in the Alaskan Bush, and his recognition of the truth, to reveal that pure happiness requires sharing it with others.

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  • Into The Wild

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  • The Good Life in Epic Narratives

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    Classic literature juxtaposes two ways of life that illustrate the poles of true happiness: a life of adventure, exemplified by Odysseus (The Odyssey), and the life at home, which poets and farmers represent. In The Iliad, Achilleus chooses to live a short, glorious life, even though he could have chosen to live a long life in anonymity. Arguments have been put forth that the life of adventure is a living hell, as Achilleus testifies from Hades after his death - in hindsight, he would have settled for the life of a slave and given up his glory, if only he could have lived longer. Alternately, the life of the (metaphorical) farmer has been despised as simple and ordinary, when true immortality is only attained with great accomplishments, such as sacking Troy or surviving heroic adventures which are then recorded. In a modern day autobiography of the 1996 ascent of Mt. Everest (Sagarmatha to the Nepalis, or “goddess of the sky”), Jon Krakauer reveals the human motivation behind adventure and tells the story of the men and women who lived and died on the expeditions to the summit during that spring (Into Thin Air). With epic literature and a recent epic, I will illuminate the values of a reflective life as well as the life of adventure, and delve into the necessary components of the ‘good life.’

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  • Jon Krakauer's Use of Ethos, Logos and Pathos When Writting Into the Wild

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    An essential part of Krakauer's argument rests upon convincing the reader that he has the authority to accurately interpret the facts of McCandless’s life. His attempt begins in chapter fourteen, where his main focus is explaining why he thinks McCandless did not go to Alaska seeking death. Krakauer establishes his credibility by drawing upon his own experiences and comparing them to McCandless’s. “If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession...” (134). This passion, he believes, is the same feeling McCandless felt while traveling across the country. At age 23, only a year younger than McCandless at the time he went to Alaska, Krakauer's preferred thrill was mountain climbing (135). During ...

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  • Jon Krakauer’s Use of Rhetorical Devices in Into the Wild

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    Krakauer, Jon. Into the wild. New York: Anchor Books , a division of Random House Inc.,, 1997. Print.

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