75 pages • 2 hours read
Jon KrakauerInto The Wild
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Musical Ability
On McCandless’s last night in Carthage before departing for Alaska, Westerberg and his friends throw a party, and McCandless winds up playing the piano. Krakauer reports, “to everyone’s surprise, McCandless sat down at the piano, which he’d never mentioned he knew how to play, and started pounding out honky-tonk country tunes, then ragtime, then Tony Bennett numbers. And he wasn’t merely a drunk inflicting his delusions of talent on a captive audience” (68). One of the friends present reports that McCandless, “could really play. I mean he was good” (68). Such scenes connect McCandless back to his childhood home, where both his father and his sister were talented musicians. McCandless’s father played piano for famous jazz musicians during college, and Chris had a rivalry with his sister Carine in the high school band. By depicting McCandless playing the piano at this farewell party, Krakauer suggests that McCandless still shared affinities with his family, despite their emotional distance and lack of contact.
The Giving and Accepting of Gifts
McCandless’s stubbornness is described by Krakauer in Chapter 11: “The only way he cared to tackle a challenge was head-on, right now, applying the full brunt of his extraordinary energy” (111). This willfulness presents itself as a motif as McCandless repeatedly rejects help in the form of gifts or advice.
While at The Slabs, McCandless works at Jan Burres’s book stall for a period. When Burres gives McCandless a ride to Salton City and tries to pay him for his services, he acts “real offended” (46). Burres gives him some warm clothing for his trip and he accepts it, but later Burres finds the clothing in her van. Jim Gallien, the man who drives McCandless to the Stampede Trail, offers to buy McCandless some gear better-suited to the Alaskan terrain, but McCandless declines and states, “I’ll be fine with what I’ve got” (6). Many people who give McCandless rides also try to advise him on how to keep him safe from harm, but McCandless largely rejects this advice as well. In the end, the same “extraordinary energy” and enthusiasm that brought him to Alaska in the first place might also have blinded him to help that could have saved his life.
The Devils Thumb
In Chapters 14 and 15 Krakauer tells the story of his own solitary journey into Alaska. While McCandless aimed to live off the land, Krakauer aimed to climb the north face of a mountain called the Devils Thumb. At the time Krakauer was working as a carpenter and had little savings. His father had hoped he would become a doctor, but Krakauer had chosen to commit himself to a different kind of lifestyle. For Krakauer, climbing the Devils Thumb became an assertion of independence and autonomy, and an expression of his ambition. The challenges he faced on the climb serve as apt metaphors for the challenges of early adulthood, and his success in overcoming those challenges represent his maturity. Although Krakauer did not attend medical school as his father had hoped, he felt that “the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different” (150). That is, where medical school was his father’s ideal expression of ambition, the Devils Thumb was Krakauer’s.
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