FREE ESSAY ON BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES (ABOUT INTO THE WILD)

BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES (ABOUT INTO THE WILD)

Beautiful Blueberries
Christopher McCandless' last journal entry before dying of starvation in the Alaska bush
was simply the words Beautiful Blueberries. Over the previous two years he bought a
secondhand canoe on impulse and paddled to Mexico. Then he lived on the streets of Los
Angeles with vagrants, camped in the Arizona dessert with hippies, tramped through almost
every western state, occasionally holding odd jobs. He also lived completely off the land
in the Alaskan backcountry. McCandless' epic journey separated him from his parents and
peers, a world of security and material excess, and a world in which he felt grievously
cut off from the raw throb of existence. It was a journey that would have been a complete
waste if it weren't for Jon Krakauer's book entitled Into the Wild.
A lot of people believe that McCandless was an idiot. He was simply one more dreamy
half-caulked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his
problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death. Some people blamed
Krakauer, in the magazine article that preceded the book, for glorifying a foolish,
pointless death. But the beauty of Krakauer's writing is that he doesn't glorify Chris
McCandless' life or even try to hide his personal weaknesses. Instead, that which becomes
evident is a vivid portrait of McCandless' journeys and an examination of why people are
attracted to high-risk activities.
Krakauer begins the book with Chris McCandless hiking into the Alaskan wilderness to his
ensuing death. He does not return to this scene until the next to last chapter,
effectively forcing the reader to see McCandless as more than an unprepared misfit who
deserved to die because of the risks he took. We learn of his adventures tramping around
the continent, discern how McCandless differs from people whom he had been favorably
compared to in the outdoors community, learn of his family and upbringing, and we are
told of a similar adventure in Alaska which almost claimed the authors life. Only then
are we returned to the morbid Alaskan scene and the controversies surrounding McCandless'
death. Krakauer succeeds in writing a powerful book because we become attached to
McCandless' dream and sympathize to a greater degree with his desire to undertake what he
labeled as the ultimate challenge.
There are some unconventional aspects of the book, which turn it into something greater
than a story of Chris McCandless. These are the way in which Krakauer goes about
examining Chris McCandless through his own life, through others who have a similar desire
for adventure, and through an examination of the novels he read. Into the Wild is not a
fluff story about a misdirected youth; it has themes to which anyone who has ever dreamed
of undertaking their own adventure, however large or small, can relate and gain insight.
Overall Krakauer believes Chris McCandless wasn't that different from anyone else who
liked adventure. Throughout the book there is an underlying battle against McCandless'
critics by trying to justify the journey. Krakauer confesses that after writing a
magazine article on McCandless he remained haunted by the particulars of the boy's
starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my
own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, Krakauer spent more than a year retracing the
convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska bush, chasing down the details with
an interest that bordered on obsession until he finished writing the book. In this fierce
passion, Krakauer is not only telling of McCandless' life but his own, and in the process
trying to make a world of critics understand why he, McCandless, and countless others are
drawn to a life of potentially suicidal adventure. This passion draws the reader in,
spins them around and spits them back out into the world with a different perception of
life. This passion makes Into the Wild an amazing book.