Learning to Annotate Characterization and Tone

Name:______Date:______Period:______

Learning to Annotate Characterization and Tone

As your concluding activity for Into the Wild, you will write a character analysis essay on Chris McCandless. In order to do this successfully, you must pay close attention to how this character is developed by the author and be aware of how a character changes throughout the story. The best way to do this is to learn to annotate text.

When you annotate text, you identify key passages and then make notes about why it is important. When annotating for character, you need to focus on both direct andindirect characterization that the author uses. Direct characterization is when the author specifically states a character trait. Indirect characterization is created through the character’s speech, actions, looks, thoughts and other characters’ opinions. Each of these details will then allow the reader to make an inference regarding the character.

Directions: Read the following excerpt from chapter 3 of Into the Wild carefully. As you read, highlight the details that provide direct and indirect characterization with two different colored highlighters. Then in the margins of the passage, explain what you believe that details reveals about the character or why you feel it’s important.

“‘Was only a couple of weeks that went by before Alex showed up in town,’ Westerberg remembers. He gave McCandless employment at the grain elevator and rented him a cheap room in one of the two houses he owned.

‘I’ve given jobs to lots of hitchhikers over the years,’ says Westerberg. ‘Most of them weren’t much good, didn’t really want to work. It was a different story with Alex. He was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter what it was, he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole—jobs where you’d get so damn dirty you couldn’t even tell what you looked like at the end of the day. And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.’

‘You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent,’ Westerberg reflects draining his third drink. ‘He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.’” (17-18)

1. After reading and annotating the passage, what conclusions can you make regarding Chris McCandless’s character? What commentary do you have to offer on his character? Complete the chart below with three pieces of evidence from the text, an inference you can make regarding Chris (Alex) and the commentary to support it. Remember that the commentary is YOUR OWN analysis.

As you read, focus on the tone of this passage. How does the author’s diction (word choice) help this tone?

“By then Chris was long gone. Five weeks earlier he’d loaded all his belongings into his little car and headed west without an itinerary. The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents world 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.

Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny.” (22-23)

2. Examine the diction used in this passage. Circle five words of which you do not know the meaning. Define them below.

3. Choose words from the passage that exemplify Chris’s old world and choose other words that exemplify the possibilities of Alex’s new world. Highlight words you associate with Chris in one color and them write them below. Highlight words you associate with Alex in another color and write them below.

4. What do you think the tone of this passage is? How does this diction support the tone of the passage? How do these words support Chris’s transcendental ideas and his rebellious nature?