Organization Kid

1. We keep coming back to this question in this course: Can Chris dissent€”or is dissent always already coopted? On the one hand, we may applaud McCandless for breaking out of the Organization Kid box his parents and schooling had stuffed him into. But on the other, does he break out of one only to repackage himself in another? Through his solo voyages, both on the road and into the wild, does he experience a rough congress with the truth, as he sought, or does he absorb himself in a fantasy scripted by Jack London, Tolstoy, and the other writers he followed so closely? Was his journey into the wild the end point or was it merely a preparatory act that readied him to live in society in his own terms?

2. In trying to sort out your views of McCandless, you may want to focus on the potential for narcissism to undermine the sought-for individual contact with supposedly raw nature. How can we tell when the harmony one might feel in the wild is a genuine confluence with natural forces and when it is just reveling in self-absorption, in a projected image of what we might want nature to be? This is what Krakauer explores in his chapter on the various kooks who died in pursuit of fantasies of Alaska; it is also what we explored in class by viewing Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man. So, you could explore the issue of narcissism all by its self as you see it emerging in Into the Wild but you could also explore it by comparing and contrasting Treadwell with McCandless. There are a lot of interesting parallels between these two temperamentally distinct people and stories: what personal and social forces drive people, especially young men, into the wild? How do the similarities help sharpen the differences€”or do they?

3. The McCandless debate: why did Krakauer’s original article in Outside Magazine touch off such a firestorm of controversy? What deep-seated values and beliefs does this story trigger and what are your own views about the issues? We have heard Krakauer confess that he admires McCandless. What does Krakauer’s narrative foreground and deepen about Chris? What’s Krakauer’sargument and how does he use non-fiction narrative to press his points? Conversely, you might disagree with Krakauer’s views, so where would you resist his story telling? What is your own view of McCandless and this kind of quest?

4. Into American Culture: although Into the Wild focuses on the short life and death of one young man, arguably Krakauer has much bigger fish to fry. That is, as we’ve noted, this book implicitly offers a cultural backstory to the tendency of young men to risk their lives going into the wild, especially the American West. The most obvious way the book does this is through the epigraphs that start each chapter, but Krakauer clearly raises larger cultural trends through his narration of McCandless’ upbringing and reactions to it. What are some broader cultural histories that Krakauer argues through this book?