Review of Death of an Innocent by Jon Krakauer

Happiness is only real when shared

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"The strangely fascinating hero of Jon Krakauer's strangely fascinating book Into the Wild is a young man who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the summer of 1992. That is the starting point of a narrative that seeks to find out why we should care.

An electrician who had picked him up four miles out of Fairbanks pressed a pair of safe boots and two sandwiches on the dangerously underequipped but charming hitchhiker, who would vouchsafe no proper noun but Alex. His parents had named him Christopher McCandless, but in his travels he preferred the invented identity Alexander Supertramp. Alex shouldered his backpack—containing petty more than books and rice—and his .22-caliber rifle and walked into the forest, to live off the land or die trying. It was April, still wintertime in Alaska.

Coming upon the impassable Toklat River, he gave up the thought of walking the 300 miles from Mount McKinley to the Bering Sea, Mr. Krakauer writes, and took up residence in a rusting Fairbanks city bus that had been fitted out equally a crude shelter. He then entered on what he called, in a manifesto scrawled on a piece of plywood, 'the climactic battle to kill the faux being within.'

Somehow McCandless grubbed a living from the snows—gathering last twelvemonth's rose hips and wizened berries, shooting squirrels, ptarmigans, porcupines and finally, in June, with his puny little .22, a moose. He tried to smoke the meat, merely his moose quickly spoiled.

By tardily summer, McCandless's incompetence and overconfidence had caught up with him. The hunters who found his rotting corpse in September also found this note:

'S O S. I demand your aid. I am injured, near death and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, delight remain to save me. I am out collecting berries shut past and shall return this night. Thank you, Chris McCandless. August?'

Dying at the age of 24, he had resumed his real name.

"What was with this guy? Why should nosotros care if he had no better sense than this? (The reactions of nigh Alaskans who read about his expiry ranged from annoyance to indignation.) And what 'false beingness'? He kept journals, and in between silences would jabber out his 'philosophy' for hours, but the Supertramp'southward ideas are never lucid enough to give us a clue.

And nonetheless, as Mr. Krakauer picks through the adventures and sorrows of Chris McCandless's brief life, the story becomes painfully moving. Mr. Krakauer'southward elegantly constructed narrative takes usa from the ghoulish moment of the hunters' discovery back through McCandless's childhood, the gregarious effusions and icy withdrawals that characterized his coming of age, and, in meticulous detail, the two years of restless roaming that led him to Alaska. The more we acquire well-nigh him, the more mysterious McCandless becomes, and the more than intriguing.

Wherever he went, McCandless sought out the detritus of the gild of privilege whose kid he was—the son of accomplished, prosperous parents (his father was an outstanding scientist with the National Aeronautics and Infinite Administration). McCandless detested the world of accomplishment and prosperity. When he graduated from Emory Academy (with a grade point boilerplate not far short of a perfect 4), he gave his inheritance of more $24,000 to charity and, without a word to anyone, hit the road. What is fantasy in a Tom Waits song was McCandless's notion of the good life.

If the globe no longer offered the sort of wilderness that freely killed those who braved its dangers, then McCandless would create a wilderness within, discarding the rudimentary protections of modern life—matches, maps, even warm clothing. 'In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita,' Mr. Krakauer writes. Hardly eating, never letting his anguished family unit know where he was, nearly dying of thirst in the Mojave Desert, canoeing a tempest-racked Gulf of California, setting fire to the last of his money, he vowed, as he wrote to an acquaintance, 'to alive this life for some fourth dimension to come up. The freedom and elementary beauty of it is but too good to turn down.'

"Mr. Krakauer, a contributing editor at Outside mag, tracks downward virtually anybody who knew McCandless in his two years of wandering. Equally their memories reconstruct Alexander Supertramp, an epitome of the young anchorite begins to emerge, so brilliant at times that it dazzles, at others so mystifying that one wants to scream. The people who meet him love him, while the reader longs to boot him in the pants. An 81-year-sometime man whom Mr. Krakauer calls Ronald A. Franz loved McCandless then much he begged to prefer him as a grandson.

'Nosotros'll talk nigh it when I get back from Alaska, Ron,' McCandless replied. The author adds: 'He had again evaded the impending threat of man intimacy.'

After he had slipped away, McCandless wrote Franz an insolent letter admonishing him to live as he, the Supertramp, saw fit: 'If you want to go more than out of life, Ron, y'all must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter way of life that will at beginning announced to y'all to be crazy.'

'Astoundingly,' Mr. Krakauer writes, 'the 81-year-old human being took the brash 24-year-erstwhile vagabond'south advice to heart. Franz placed his furniture and most of his other possessions in a storage locker, bought a GMC Duravan and . . . sabbatum out in the desert, mean solar day afterwards day after day, awaiting his immature friend's return.'

"McCandless's passion was all for the struggle within himself, a half-blind inner seeking for he knew not what—some sort of transcendence through renunciation. The reader never comes to make sense of his spiritual craving, only its very impalpability makes information technology familiar. Do we not all thirst for something we cannot ascertain? Does McCandless'due south fanatical determination to find it make him a saint, a holy fool or but manifestly nuts?

The one weakness of Mr. Krakauer's attempt to understand Chris McCandless lies in an inadequate consideration of psychiatric disease. Indeed, he says directly out, 'McCandless wasn't mentally ill.' But in a long and engaging aside about his ain youthful daring of death, Mr. Krakauer lets us know that he himself has sought out risks that near of usa would telephone call insane.

Did McCandless want to die in Alaska? That is Mr. Krakauer's ultimate question, and the whole book can be seen every bit a quest for a compassionate respond. Mr. Krakauer's antihero conforms to no familiar type. His contradictions, in retrospect, do non illumine just rather obscure his grapheme. In expiry, he passes across the achieve of mortal comprehension.

Christopher McCandless'southward life and his death may have been meaningless, absurd, even reprehensible, but by the end of Into the Wild, you lot intendance for him deeply."

–Thomas McNamee, The New York Times, March three, 1996

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