Into the Wild Reading Check

Into the Wild

Reading Check

For each question, write why it's significant to the story.
1. Alex Supertramp
2. “s.o.s.…thank you, chris mccandless, August?”
3. Sixty-seven pounds
4. “It is associated in our minds with the escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, and the road has always led [?]”
5. Fall 1990. “…owns a grain elevator in Carthage and another one a few miles out of town,” in whom McCandless found a surrogate family.
6. “…an eminent aerospace engineer who designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle and other high-profile projects.”
7. Spring 1990.3.72
8. OXFAM America
9. “…an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything,” an emancipation from the “stifling world of parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”
10. “To the [?] go prophets and hermits; through [?]s go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.”
11. Ironically, what the Park Service used over the next three years to “make undercover drug buys that led to numerous arrests.”
12. Summer 1990. $123 in a pile in the sand / “a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud”
13. January 1991.“He had not seen or talked to another soul in thirty-six days. For that entire period he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what marine life he could pull from the sea, an experience that would later convince him he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush.”
14. All hail the Dominant [?] Beast. And Captain Ahab Too!
15. December 1991. The Slabs
16. McCandless had been infatuated with [?] since childhood…[with his] fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great unwashed”; however, Chris forgot that “they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with [the writer’s] romantic sensibilities that with the actualities of life in subarctic wilderness.”
17. Jan and Bob Burres,
18. January 1992.Ronald A. Franz, 80 years old
19. Oh-My-God-Hot Springs
20. ALEX is subscribed at the left end; then the initials C. J.M. frame a skull and crossbones. Across the strip of cowhide one sees a rendering of a two-lane blacktop; a no u-turn sign, a thunderstorm producing a flash flood that engulfs a car; a hitchhiker’s thumb, an eagle, the Sierra Nevada, salmon cavorting in the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Coast Highway from Oregon to Washington, the Rocky Mountains, Montana wheat fields, a South Dakota rattlesnake, [the] house in Carthage, the Colorado River, a gale in the Gulf of California, a canoe beached beside a tent, Las Vegas, the initials T.C.D., Morro Bay, Astoria, and at the end, the letter N (presumably representing north). Executed with remarkable skill and creativity, this [?] is as astonishing as any artifact Chris McCandless left behind.
21. March 1992. “…relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of the lives before anything was expected of him. And now he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’ life as well. Painlessly, that is, from McCandless’s perspective—but not from the old man’s.” Explain the passage.
22. “When I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord.”
23. Spring 1992/Carthage. Alex’s job in Carthage.
24. Gail Borah, Westerberg’s longtime, on-again, off-again girlfriend, a petite sad-eyed woman, as slight as a heron, with delicate features and long blond hair.
25. “[McCandless] said they were pretty close. Said she was beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would turn their heads and stare.”
26. “the chill between McCandless and his parents”
27. the number of women McCandless probably slept with in his life
28. the philosophy behind McCandless’s sexual innocence
29. “the negative mail sent by Alaskans”
30. the life and death of Gene Rosellini, the Mayor of Hippie Cove
31. the life and death of John Mallon Waterman
32. the life and death of amateur photographer Carl McCunn
33. the life and death of 1934 Utah resident Everett Reuss
34. nemo 1934
35. alexander supertramp/May 1992
36. Everett’s withdrawal from organized society, his disdain for worldly pleasures, and his signatures…all strongly suggests that he identified with [this literary character].”
37. the Irish monks known as papar, known for their courage, reckless innocence, and the urgency of their desire
38. Jim Gallien
39. How Alaskan troopers finally identified the body of the anonymous hiker in September, 1992.
40. Sam McCandless, 9 years older than Chris
41. Chris McCandless, age two
42. Loren Johnson, Chris’s grandfather
43. the Road Warriors, Chris’s high school
44. Chris’s “after-hours” activities in high school
45. “shameful, corrupting, inherently evil”
46. the irony of Chris’s anti-capitalistic philosophies
47. the discovery Chris made about his father’s previous marriage
48. Buckley
49. Carine McCandless’s reaction to her brother’s death
50. [?], witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow
51. the author’s adolescence
52. Devil’s Thumb
53. the author’s epiphany about his father
54. “[?] appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of [it] created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.” — Roderick Nash
55. April 21, 1992 / The Alaska Interior. May 1, 1992. “Magic Bus Day.”
56. July 5, 1992. the Teklanika River
57. U.S. Geological Survey gauging station
58. misidentification of the caribou
59. McCandless’s arrogance
60. McCandless’s moral absolutism
61. the primary subject of his Alaskan journal
62. evidence that McCandless’s “long sabbatical had changed him some significant way”
63. July 30, 1992. extremely weak. fault of pot. seed.
64. “the body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy”
65. August 18, 1992. 112 days after he’d walked into the wild.
66. ten months after they found out that Chris was dead

And here are some examples of introductions using Into the Wild.
“The system, preachments, and methodologies of the twentieth century,” writes John Roth in discussing the works of Ken Kesey, “had indeed betrayed humankind and left it with only two choices: It could either passively conform and thus lose individuality or find some way to exist in the modern wasteland without losing dignity and freedom” (515). A hero, then, in such a world, finds a way to exist within it; he does not run away from the heroic challenge confronting him. The true challenge of modern life is not to find an alternative home — is not to run to the wilderness, or to the sea, or into the underground —but is, instead, to find “home” within the existing system — and to do so without having to compromise one’s self and integrity. If this means being destroyed by the system, then so be it; it is much more heroic than finding destruction elsewhere—in those things which take you away from the real world. In Jon Kraukauer’s Into the Wild, we meet Chris McCandless, a young man who walked into the wild — in a journey away from society — only to find starvation in the Alaskan frontier. For some readers, the youth that emerges out of a reading is a hero, but that is a gross mis-reading of these events. Chris McCandless is not a hero, for he ran when he should have stayed still, choosing a childish flight of fancy and illusion over the confrontation that would have made him a man.
“I now walk into the wild,” writes Chris McCandless to his friend Wayne Westerberg before his fatal journey, signing the note with his self-proclaimed new name, Alex. This note — preceding the first Chapter —supposedly proclaims the heroic intentions of its writer, the heroism connected to the idea of setting off on a journey alone into wilderness. The hero’s journey — “to find a way to exist in the modern wasteland without losing dignity and freedom” (Roth 515) — only applies to Chris’s escape if it provides either him or us with an answer to this modern dilemma. If, instead, the journey is not “a battle with necessity” (Berlin 156) and with “a condition of life” (159), then the ride to freedom loses its heroic quality. Too many times, Chris’s journey is away from these things — with those things necessary and conditional to life within the world, things such as families, societal obligations, structures, responsibilities, and humanity. Rather than confronting the challenges asked of not only Chris but of all young adults — to find a way to be both part of the world and true to himself —he instead turns his back on these battles, preferring to escape into a world where he feels no such conflict. For this reason, he is not a hero.
“I now walk into the wild,” writes Chris McCandless to his friend Wayne Westerberg before his fatal journey, signing the note with his self-proclaimed new name, Alex. This note — preceding the first Chapter — boldly proclaims the heroic intentions of its writer, the heroism connected to the idea of setting off on a journey alone into wilderness. The hero’s journey — “to find a way to exist in the modern wasteland without losing dignity and freedom” (Roth 515) — clearly applies to Chris’s escape, for he has committed himself to finding its answer. Too many times, we readily accept the compromises necessary to live in the world unconditionally, without ever bringing into question their necessity. Heroes asks the questions most of us cannot, for we lack the character, the commitment, and vision necessary to embark upon a quest into the wild—not just the literal wilderness of the West, or of Alaska, but also the symbolic territory of the tragic loss resulting in the movement from nature to civilization. Chris battles these demons and questions for us in his attempt to bring into question our attachment to “what is and what must be,” and for this reason, he is a true hero.