If you want to read another Krakauer text, his Into Thin Air is a good choice. Online e-text:

The material below is from Rutgers. I pair the material with and allow students to see that the reckless or ill prepared adventurer may be a universal archetype for it is true that every period of time has had the lone adventurer seeking his/her own fate. From ancient Greek Odysseus to modern female Amelia Earhart to 2007 soloist and adventurer Steve Fossett, men and women have needed to test their own limits and press the boundaries of existence. Everett Ruess is just another adventurer (1930) and his story is just as interesting and compelling. Students can look at circumstances 50 years apart and see the same story. Jackie Lepore

Jon Krakauer, Selections from Into the Wild, "The Alaska Interior" and "The Stampede Trail," and another selection. The readings below can be found in the New Humanities Reader.

  • David Abram, "The Ecology of Magic"
  • Annie Dillard, "The Wreck of Time"
  • Susan Faludi, "The Naked Citadel"
  • Jon Gertner, "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness"
  • AzarNafisi, "Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books"
  • Tim O'Brien, "How to Tell a True War Story"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the

Abram & Krakauer: Shamanism and the Excursion into the Wild

In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer attempts "to make sense of [Chris] McCandless's life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive." For this paper, I want you to discuss how Abram's notion of the shaman helps to make sense of McCandless's story.

You may want to consider some of the following questions. As always, this is not a checklist of things to include in your paper, but rather a list of possible jumping-off points to help you get started towards a thesis of your own.

  1. Did McCandless see himself as a shaman-like figure? Does Krakauer? Do you?
  2. Does it make sense to see Krakauer himself, rather than McCandless, as a shaman?
  3. How would Abram regard McCandless's actions?
  4. Would Krakauer be as impressed with Abram's adventures as he is with McCandless's?
  5. Does anything in Abram's essay help to account for the harshness of McCandless's critics?
  6. Does McCandless's fate prove anything about the problems with the Western attitude to nature that Abram describes?

Work with the readings from Abram and Krakauer only--we're done with Pollan and Heim (for the time being)!

Craig Eliason, Fall 2000

Krakauer & Dillard: The Significance of Death

Jon Krakauer tells us that Chris McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness. What is the significance of that death? After all, as Annie Dillard quotes murderer Ted Bundy, "there are so many people" (194).

Krakauer tries "to make sense of McCandless's ... death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive" (439). Dillard asks, "How can an individual count?" (195) For this paper, I would like to discuss what makes a human death significant or insignificant. As always, your paper should be built around your own argument about this topic as it emerges from your consideration of the readings. Thus three perspectives on how a death can be meaningful or meaningless -- Krakauer's, Dillard's, and your own -- should be put into dialogue in your paper.

Circle or underline your thesis in both your rough draft and final paper. This should be one to two sentences long and should appear on the first page.

Before you turn your paper in, make sure all of the following are true:

  1. My essay analyzes the readings rather than merely summarizing them.
  2. I have included effective and correct uses of quotation in every paragraph.
  3. I have avoided repeating grammatical errors I have made in previous essays.
  4. Each paragraph meets the paragraph checklist.
  5. I have presented and argued a thesis.

Craig Eliason, Fall 2000

KrakauerFaludi: Defining Identity

In "The Naked Citadel," Susan Faludi sets out to study how young men are turned into soldiers at a military academy. They surrender willingly their personal identities in order to become part of a group dynamic. In Jon Krakauer's “Selections from Into the Wild ,” the author relates how a recent college graduate by the name of Christopher McCandless decides to stop being a part of society in order to become a better individual. McCandless' spiritual journey to the Alaskan Wilderness is his personal quest to “become a man” under his own terms.

What do these two essays suggest regarding how a person's identity is defined and experienced within his or her own lifetime? Is it something we own for ourselves, something that we have no control over, or just something else? What roles do groups and individuals play inside this situation?

Think of the following as a helping hand. Would you argue that McCandless' journey is consistent with the Citadel's efforts to create a certain kind of man? What role does “choice” plays? Take a risk and create a working project using these two essays. Be specific and show me what you can do.

Angel Soto, Fall 2005

KrakauerGertner: Individuals and Adventures

What draws individuals to undertake grand personal adventures? Take your own position on this question, considering the issues raised in Gertner's and Krakauer's essays. Show how Gertner's article confirms, complicates, or contradicts Krakauer's reflections. And what are the implications of Chris McCandless's story for the argument represented in Gertner's article? The objective of this assignment is to make connections between the two essays. Do not simply compare or contrast them; discuss the authors in relation to one another.

Some additional thoughts and questions that you may choose to address in your answer:

• WasMcCandless's behavior rational? In what ways? If not, why did he do it? What might Gertner and his researchers say about McCandless's motives?

• TakingMcCandless as an example but speaking generally, what is the appeal of the natural world? What does it represent in the imagination of those who seek it, and what power does it hold for them?

• Consider what elements of McCandless's fantasies and desires are pervasive in American culture.

• What does the specifically American nature of McCandless's quest have to do with the “pursuit of happiness” as Gertner understands it?

Tim Cassedy, Fall 2005

KrakauerNafisi: The Nature of Freedom

Chris McCandless tried to find freedom by seeking solitude. AzarNafisi and her students try to find freedom by meeting as a group. Does Nafisi understand something about freedom that McCandless missed? Or is it the other way around? Do their understandings of freedom—if they are indeed different—complement each other in any way?

Geoff Kurtz, Fall 2005

Krakauer & O'Brien: Truth?

Both Jon Krakauer and Tim O’Brien, in the assigned readings, stress the importance of trying to arrive at the truth of what happened to their central characters. In “Selections from Into the Wild,” Krakauer does a great deal of investigation in his attempt to determine the truth about why Chris McCandless felt the need to escape into the Alaskan wilderness, and why he died in the endeavor. Similarly, although “How to Tell a True War Story,” is actually a work of fiction, Tim O’Brien stresses repeatedly that he is seeking to arrive at the truth about what happened to him and his fellow soldiers during the Viet Nam War.

How do you define and understand the “truth”, in light of the truth that both Krakauer and O’Brien are trying to arrive at in their work? Does it mean the same thing to you as it does to either or both authors? Do you feel that one of them is more successful than the other in his attempt to arrive at the truth? Why or why not?

Mary-Jane Oltarzewski, Fall 2005

Everest a Year Later: False Summit
After a lifetime of wanting, Jon Krakauer made it to the world's highest point. What he and the other survivors would discover in the months to come, however, is that it's even more difficult to get back down.
By Mark Bryant

  • "Everest a Year Later: Lessons in Futility," May 1997
  • Jon Krakauer in The Lodge

For this magazine it began four years ago, when we heard that 40 climbers, several of them clients on commercially guided expeditions, had reached the summit of Mount Everest on a single day. That so many should crowd onto the highest spot on earth was astonishing and troubling. What might this suggest to other weekend climbers about the apparent ease of adding Everest to one's trophy case? What might it augur on a peak already swarming with too many climbers too inexperienced to save themselves — let alone others — if caught by one of the Himalayas' frequent storms? It seemed a foregone conclusion that reality would soon strike home with a vengeance. The only question was when.

By the time we asked contributing editor and lifelong climber Jon Krakauer to examine firsthand the circumstances that might lead to a disaster, things had only gotten worse. Swelling ranks of amateur climbers were paying ever fatter sums to be escorted up the peak, and some outfitters seemed to be all but guaranteeing the summit. Guide Rob Hall ran an ad boasting of a "100 percent success rate." "Hey, experience is overrated," another guide, Scott Fischer, told Krakauer while we were shopping around for a commercial expedition for him to join. "We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit."

If only that had been true. Instead, on May 10, 1996, after Krakauer and 23 others reached the top, dozens of climbers became trapped on the descent, pinned down by gale-force winds and triple-digit windchill. Eight lost their lives, including Hall and three others on Krakauer's six-person summit team. Another who died that day: Fischer. By the end of the month, 12 people on the mountain would perish, the highest single-season body count in Everest history.

Krakauer and many of the other survivors were left scarred and shaken. Nevertheless, Krakauer turned around and wrote, with real and awful authority, "Into Thin Air," a hypnotic, heartbreaking account of the tragedy published in Outside's September 1996 issue. No other article in the magazine's 20 years has prompted the reaction this piece has; many months later, we're still receiving letters from readers haunted by Krakauer's tale. It's a story that won't go away. Nor, given its chastening ramifications, should it. A fellow writer and friend of the magazine recently remarked that the episode put him in mind of another instance of nature slapping down humankind and our runaway hubris: the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Then he asked if anyone had learned anything this time around.

Krakauer has now expanded his report into a searing book, also titled Into Thin Air, to be published this month by Villard. With the grim anniversary of the tragedy approaching, editor Mark Bryant sat down with Krakauer in the Seattle home he shares with his wife, Linda Moore. Friends and colleagues for 15 years, Krakauer and Bryant assessed the damages, explored the practical and moral dimensions of risk, and talked about how Jon and his fellow survivors are faring in the aftermath.

MB: One of the most frequently asked questions to come our way these past months is how one justifies the pursuit of something that's arguably so supremely selfish. Rob Hall, Doug Hansen, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Andy Harris, and seven others were lost to their loved ones last May. Linda nearly lost you. And people ask, for what? Unlike dangerous but arguably selfless, even noble pursuits — like firefighting or relief work or space exploration — mountaineering, in the wake of the Everest deaths, strikes many as benefiting no one but the mountaineer himself. Especially when it comes across more like trophy hunting.

JK: I guess I don't try to justify climbing, or defend it, because I can't. I see climbing as a compulsion that at its best is no worse than many other compulsions — golf or stamp collecting or growing world-record pumpkins. And yet until Everest I probably never fully appreciated the emotional devastation it can wreak. Seeing the hurt it caused the families of good people — this has shaken me deeply, and I haven't fully come to terms with it yet. I started climbing when I was eight — that's 35 years ago — and it's been the driving force in my life for at least 24, 25 of those years. So when I got back from Everest, I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd devoted my life to something that isn't just selfish and vainglorious and pointless, but actually wrong.

There's no way to defend it, even to yourself, once you've been involved in something like this disaster. And yet I've continued to climb. I don't know what that says about me or the sport other than the potential power it has. What makes climbing great for me, strangely enough, is this life and death aspect. It sounds trite to say, I know, but climbing isn't just another game. It isn't just another sport. It's life itself. Which is what makes it so compelling and also what makes it so impossible to justify when things go bad.

MB: In his account of his successful 1963 ascent, Everest: The West Ridge, Tom Hornbein, who's been a friend and role model to you, wrote, "But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I left behind." You quote this line in your book, so the idea must resonate for you. What did you think climbing Everest was going to do for you, and what do you think other people want from it?

JK: It's certainly nothing that stands up to sober-minded scrutiny. Before going to Nepal, I wasn't thinking, "If I climb Everest, my life will improve in such and such specific ways." It's not like that. You simply think that if you can succeed at something that huge, that seemingly impossible, surely it won't merely alter your life, it will transform it. As naive as that sounds, saying it out loud, I think it's a pretty common expectation.

MB: There are certainly harder climbs, any number of routes on any number of peaks that serious alpinists consider more worthy. But Everest, when all's said and done, is still Everest. And for those whom that mountain gets in its grip...

JK: Right. And yet Everest deserves more credit than it gets in some quarters. I came away with infinitely more respect for it — and not simply because it killed several people last May and nearly killed me. It's an amazing peak, more beautiful than I'd imagined. And the South Col route, which I'd always demeaned as the "yak route" up a mountain I'd called the "slag heap," is in fact an aesthetic and worthy climb. But even before you get there, well — I just can't stress enough how Everest warps people. Even Linda, who casts a jaundiced eye toward climbing.

MB: Having been a climber herself, Linda knows all too well...

JK: She does know all too well; she sees the complete absurdity of climbing. Yet even she remains in the thrall of Everest — she read too many National Geographic articles as a kid, is how she puts it. She's somehow starstruck by Everest: "Wow, you've climbed Everest." Despite the fact that she's as cynical as anyone about climbing, she acknowledges that Everest is something special, that it can't be assessed like other mountains. And if you don't understand Everest and appreciate its mystique, you're never going to understand this tragedy and why it's quite likely to be repeated.

MB: There's a wonderful passage in the autobiography of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who made the first ascent of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, about the many arguments he used to try to convince himself not to attempt the peak with a Canadian romantic named Earl Denman in 1947: that Denman had precious little experience, no money, no permission to enter Tibet for a climb of the North Face, and so on. But then he writes, "Any man in his right mind would have said no. But I couldn't say no. For in my heart I needed to go, and the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth."

JK: Yeah, I love that quote. Among the reasons I love it is because it illustrates that while climbers sometimes tend to think of Sherpas as mainly being in it for the money, here was someone who'd been trying to get on a successful Everest team since 1933 and was as deeply "in its grip," as you say, as I was 50 years later. I'd had this secret desire to climb Everest that never left me from the time I was nine and Tom Hornbein and WilliUnsoeld, a friend of my father's, made it in '63. They were my childhood heroes, and Everest was always a big deal to me, though I buried the desire until Outside called. And as critical as I've been of some of the guides and clients in the magazine piece and in the book, on one level I identify with them very deeply. I had summit fever as bad as anyone, and I was there for reasons that, professional duties aside, were no less suspect than anyone else's. I wanted to climb it — that's why I was there. Sure, I thought there was an interesting, even important story to be told about what was happening to Everest. But I wouldn't have taken the writing assignment if I wasn't utterly motivated to get to that summit.