Story Of Flight From Civilization A Classic Tragedy
“Into the Wild” By Jon Krakauer (207 pages, Villard Books, $22)
Readers may at first have some trouble sympathizing with Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young man whose mysterious death in the Alaska wilderness Jon Krakauer explores so movingly in his new book, “Into the Wild.”
As McCandless’ story unfolds in these pages, he seems to have been lacking in both adequate supplies and proper know-how when he waved goodbye to a trucker who had given him a lift and tramped off into the bush on April 28, 1992.
What’s more, the idealism that prompted this fatal romantic adventure appears both flawed and badly articulated, amounting as it does to phrases like “plastic people” and the need to “revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.”
What’s particularly tough to take is McCandless’ refusal to tell his devoted family his whereabouts after he graduated with honors from Emory University in 1990 and set off on his cockeyed hegira. Krakauer does not even offer speculation about some heroic psychic drama his subject might have been unconsciously acting out.
In short, at least at the beginning of “Into the Wild,” you share the outraged reactions of so many who read the article by Krakauer in Outside magazine from which this book developed.
As one angry Alaskan put it in a letter to the author: “Such willful ignorance …just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility.”
Yet if Krakauer too readily exposes his subject’s shortcomings, he also does a masterly job of keeping the reader’s condemnation at bay. While conceding his subject’s many flaws, he keeps hinting that something was special about this case. He reveals through the eyes of many who met McCandless during his flight how particularly intelligent, unusual and just plain likable this young man was.
Because the story involves overbearing pride, a reversal of fortune and a final moment of recognition, it has elements of classic tragedy. By the end, Krakauer has taken the tale of a kook who went into the woods, and made of it a heart-rending drama of human yearning.