Into The Wild

Jon Krakauer is the narrator of Into the Wild. After writing an article about McCandless’s death for Outside magazine, Krakauer spent a year researching and then writing Into the Wild. Krakauer employs a number of points of view in telling McCandless’s story, frequently alternating between past, present, and future tense, as well as the first and third person. While the book focuses primarily on McCandless’s life, Krakauer writes two chapters in first person that from a personal account of a dangerous journey to Alaska. Krakauer interviews and profiles McCandless’s family and several others who met him. Throughout the text, Krakauer balances journalistic objectivity, novelistic detail, and personal observation gleaned from experience and research.

Walt McCandless, Chris McCandless’s father, is a formidably intelligent former NASA employee who runs a consulting operation with his wife Billie. Walt is described as an intense and sometimes overbearing father who softened once his son Chris disappears. Walt had five children in a previous marriage before divorcing his wife, marrying Billie, and having Chris and Carine. Chris became resentful toward his father when he found out that Walt fathered another son with his previous wife after marrying Billie.

Billie McCandless is Chris’s mother and Walt McCandless’s wife. She met Walt while working as his secretary at age 22 and helped Walt run their consulting firm while raising Chris and his sister Carine. Chris adored her father, an avid outdoorsman.

Carine McCandless is Chris’s younger sister. She is as tall as Chris, looks like him, and has long hair that comes down to her waist. She and Chris were close, although Carine also has a strong relationship with her parents and a different attitude toward wealth.

Ron Franz is the pseudonym of an 80-year-old man who befriended McCandless after giving him a ride near Salton City, California. Ron Franz is a devout Christian and was formerly in the army; his wife and child died in a car accident in the 1950s. Franz was arguably the person most affected by his encounter with McCandless, and at one point he asked McCandless if he could adopt him.

Wayne Westerberg owns a grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota. Westerberg befriended and hired McCandless, who came to see Westerberg’s Carthage as a kind of second home.

Jan Burres is a traveler who befriended McCandless and gave him a job at her bookstall in The Slabs, a transient community in the California desert.