Summary: Chapter 8

Jon Krakauer picks up the explanation of the reception of his 1993 Outdoor magazine article about McCandless’s death that he began in Chapter Six. He quotes a number of letters the magazine received criticizing McCandless, particularly those from experienced campers and Alaska residents, who see the young man’s trip as at best too romantic and at worst dangerously foolhardy. Many letter writers also describe McCandless as a too-familiar type, as a starry-eyed incompetent running from his problems or a nihilist with suicidal tendencies. As if to confirm these descriptions, the narrator then lists other instances of men who became drifters, including several personal encounters from his own travels in Alaska and his time as a mountaineer. By establishing his familiarity with the history of American outdoorsmen and thrill seekers, Krakauer underlines his own authority and sets himself up to refute McCandless’s detractors.

Krakauer offers biographical portraits of three men, Gene Rosellini, the mountain climber John Mallon Waterman, and the photographer Carl McCunn as a means of deepening his and the reader’s understanding of Christopher McCandless. Wealthy and intelligent, Rosellini earned several advanced degrees and then became an exercise fanatic. He killed himself just before embarking on his plan to live out of his backpack for the rest of his life. A master climber who had suffered psychiatric breakdown at different points in his life, Waterman died while attempting to summit Denali, one of the most difficult peaks in the world. The narrator also draws parallels between McCandless and Carl McCunn. The narrator then differentiates McCandless from these three men and suggests a fourth comparison, a 20-year-old named Everett Ruess.

Summary: Chapter 9

Krakauer opens the chapter by describing a Southwestern canyon called Davis Gulch, a watershed in the midst of the desert. Davis Gulch contains petroglyphs left behind by the Anasazi people, as well as a carving left in 1993 by a young man named Everett Ruess, who, like Christopher McCandless, disappeared into the wild. Krakauer then relates Ruess’s life and the travails and adventures that brought him to Davis Gulch, where he left a final inscription of his name before disappearing.

Ruess was born in 1914 to a middle-class family that lived primarily in Southern California. After a short stint in college, he apprenticed himself to the photographer Edward Weston, built friendships with California artists, and then set out to live as a tramp. He renamed himself, choosing the name “Nemo,” or “no one,” and sought to remove himself from society in favor of an ascetic or pilgrim’s life. Krakauer includes excerpts from Ruess’s correspondence in which he describes the allure of the solitary life. He insists that his correspondents wouldn’t be able to understand how exciting he finds the wilderness. Krakauer links Ruess’s lack of concern for personal safety to McCandless’s.

Krakauer then uses Ruess’s letters to track him from a Mormon settlement in California into Davis Gulch. Apparently, Ruess was expected in Marble Canyon, Arizona and never arrived, leading his parents to organize a search party in March 1935. Ruess is never found. The prevailing assumption remains that he died while climbing in the canyon or drowned, though some locals apparently maintain that they have seen or met him. Krakauer interviews a man named Ken Sleight, who describes Ruess and McCandless as both liking people too much to give them up entirely but disliking them enough never to be able to live in society. Krakauer says he believes that both Ruess and McCandless were like the papar, a group of ancient monks who sailed from Ireland toward Iceland in the fourth century without knowing whether they’d ever find land.

Analysis

Chapters Eight and Nine present several characters with whom Jon Krakauer explicitly compares Christopher McCandless in a further attempt to solve the mystery of his psychology. These chapters are thus largely argumentative or expository, though both contain significant amounts of storytelling in a biographical vein. Krakauer begins by profiling three men who had similar drive and intelligence, as well as similar backgrounds. Gene Rosellini seemed to want to prove he could do anything he set his mind to, as a means of combatting nihilism or the ennui and stasis induced by his inherited wealth. The mountain climber John Mallon Waterman suffered from obsessive tendencies that led him to extraordinary achievements but also led to psychiatric hospitalization and his eventual death. Carl McCunn loved nature but was too absentminded to secure his own safety. All three characters seem to speak to certain of McCandless’s tendencies, but they cannot be said to exhaust his psychological profile, nor do they seemingly explain why his story proved so fascinating to so many people.

The centerpiece of this section is Krakauer’s portrait of Everett Ruess in Chapter Nine, which is positioned as a miniaturization of McCandless’s life. The narrator guides the reader through an explicit comparison between the two that advances the book’s secondary, more subtle plot of Krakauer’s developing character study of McCandless. Both McCandless and Ruess renounced the world in favor of a solitary life they found exhilarating and that was for them specific to the American west. Both McCandless and Ruess left behind loving families who were desperate to know what happened to their sons and mounted fruitless searches. They both generated wild speculation as to what might have happened to them, speculation that seems to endure to this day. The positioning of Ruess’s story within Into the Wild also broadens the appeal of McCandless’s story. Through its telling, Krakauer makes the implicit claim that McCandless’s death represents a particularly rich and ambiguous modern example of an enduring type. His connection of Ruess’s story to the life of the Anasazi people of Davis Gulch underlines this point.

Read more about the motif of ascetics, artists, and holy figures.

Late in Chapter Nine, Krakauer turns to a much more ancient point of comparison than the other, twentieth century examples in this section, which launches one of Into the Wild’s minor themes and also evidences the important role of historical writing in the book. Krakauer names the papar, Irish priests who sailed for Iceland without navigational tools and without knowing that any destination awaited them. This comparison suggests that those who renounce life in society could be thought of as spiritual or as priestlike. Total comfort with, even desire for the unknown continues to mark McCandless as distinct from any of the people he meets and from his family, a comfort that reminds Krakauer of the priests. This otherworldly courage, Krakauer suggests, make McCandless not just an aesthete but a pilgrim or a person who seeks a kind of holiness in the wild. Krakauer uses historical writing and historical examples to make a very strong claim about McCandless’s character, suggesting that there may have always been young men like him and that there may always be.

Chapters Eight and Nine pose interesting questions about gender, since all the figures that Krakauer compares to Christopher McCandless are male. They also avoid intimate or even close relationships with women. Adventure and risktaking activity are described as masculine by default, and involve the rejection of domesticity even as, especially in McCandless’s case, survival requires domestic activity like cooking and socializing. Krakauer makes very little explicit comment on this fact in these particular chapters. This lends the narration a quality of innocent but unexamined bias.

Read an in-depth analysis of Jon Krakauer, the author and narrator of Into the Wild.