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Chapter 1

A man named Jim Gallien picks up a young hitchhiker calling himself “Alex” who says he plans to stay in Alaska’s Denali National Park. Because he can see that Alex is unprepared for such an experience, Gallien is concerned, but he assumes Alex will give up as soon as he faces hardships.

Chapter 2

A group of hunters and hikers find an abandoned bus that has served as a shelter for people. There is a note stating that the occupant, Christopher J. McCandless, is sick and needs help. Inside the bus, they find a dead body that is later determined to be a human who died of starvation.

Read a full Summary & Analysis of Chapters 1 & 2

Chapter 3

In an interview with Jon Krakauer, Wayne Westerberg, who employed McCandless for a while, describes him as having been handsome and hardworking. McCandless was from an upper middle-class family in Virginia, but he eschewed traditional values and measures of success. He graduated from college, but refused his parents’ offer to fund law school, telling them instead that he planned to disappear.

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Chapter 4

Krakauer describes what he learned by tracing McCandless’s activities after his disappearance, which consisted mostly of hiking and wandering alone in national parks while occasionally doing farm work. After an unsuccessful foray into Mexico, McCandless lived on the streets in Las Vegas.

Chapter 5

Krakauer is unable to find much about McCandless’s time in Las Vegas, but after that he was homeless in Arizona until an old man named Charlie took him in. McCandless actively engaged with others in an itinerant community called Slabs, where he lived with Jan Burres and her boyfriend.

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Chapter 6

After Krakauer publishes a story he wrote about McCandless, he meets with a recovering alcoholic and veteran who looked after McCandless for a while and considered him not just a friend, but like family. The man, Ronald A. Franz, urged McCandless to find a job and settle, which McCandless countered by urging Franz to become less sedentary and more free-spirited. Franz was grief-stricken by the news of McCandless’s death in Alaska.

Chapter 7

Krakauer meets with Westerberg and a group of people who interacted with and grew fond of McCandless before he left on his fatal trip to Alaska. Their stories about his behavior along with speculation about McCandless’s distrust of his parents and his apparent celibacy feed Krakauer’s belief that McCandless sought the solitude of nature because his desire for human contact was too strong to be fulfilled. Burres and her boyfriend, as well as Westerberg and his girlfriend, received postcards bidding them goodbye in which McCandless explained that he’d never come back from the wild.

Read a full Summary & Analysis of Chapters 6 & 7

Chapter 8

Krakauer summarizes some letters about McCandless that were written by experienced campers and Alaskans in response to his article about him. Krakauer describes three men who died under circumstances not dissimilar from McCandless’s and draws parallels and contrasts with each of them before concluding that a young man named Everett Ruess is a better person with whom to compare McCandless.

Chapter 9

Everett Ruess was born to a middle-class family, and like McCandless, removed himself from society in favor of a solitary life in the wilderness. Also, like McCandless, Ruess showed little concern for personal safety and disappeared, leaving his worried family to search for him, although in Reuss’s case, they never found his body.

Read a full Summary & Analysis of Chapters 8 & 9

Chapter 10

Through the help of Gallien and Westerberg, McCandless is finally identified as the man that the hunters and hikers found dead in the abandoned bus at Denali. His half-brother goes to Alaska to identify him.

Chapter 11

Krakauer visits McCandless’s father and learns about McCandless’s upbringing, including his uneasy relationship with his parents, sparked by what he considered their overbearing behavior and his rejection of tradition.

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Chapter 12

Krakauer continues to reach into McCandless’s past, describing how McCandless gradually fell out of touch with his family as he made an extensive tour of the American West before his freshman year of college. McCandless grew more withdrawn while in college, which Krakauer suggests resulted from psychological scars he received when he learned that his father had been maintaining a secret relationship with his first wife and family.

Chapter 13

Krakauer visits McCandless’s sister and finds her still grieving his death. After describing the emotional toll that McCandless’s behavior and subsequent death have taken on his surviving family members, Krakauer reflects on his selfishness.

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Chapter 14

Describing an event in his own life with strong parallels to McCandless, Krakauer tells of how as a young man seeking to put distance between himself and his father, he traveled to Alaska to climb a difficult peak called Devils Thumb. Krakauer nearly died as a result of being underprepared but survived when a plane dropped food for him.

Chapter 15

Krakauer explains how he became a carpenter and climber as a rejection of his father’s attempts to mold him, and he describes his father’s physical and mental decline. At Devils Thumb, and perhaps unknowingly influenced by his father’s insistence on achievement, Krakauer tried again to reach the summit, only to fail again before ultimately succeeding. Stating that his survival and McCandless’s death were both matters of chance, Krakauer concludes that McCandless did not have a death wish, but rather was guided by a youthful adventurer’s disregard for death and attraction to the mystery of danger.

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Chapter 16

Details of the later stages of McCandless’s journey are given, starting with deliveryman Gaylord Stuckey who drove him from the Yukon territory to Fairbanks. After Gallien dropped off McCandless outside Denali National Park, McCandless chanced upon the abandoned bus that became his home base and wrote in his journal of achieving independence and escaping the poison of civilization, unaware that he was quite near a highway.

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Chapter 17

A year after McCandless’s death, Krakauer and three others reach the area, where he finds ample evidence that McCandless could have survived if he’d been prepared. When they reach the bus, Krakauer is unnerved to find McCandless’s possessions. Krakauer decides that McCandless was motivated by self-sacrifice and a quest to achieve happiness on his own, and not by a desire to conquer.

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Chapter 18

Krakauer speculates on what might have occurred during McCandless’s final days. He decides that McCandless’s death from starvation resulted from eating  toxic mold, but that the real cause was his lack of awareness of his surroundings. McCandless, aware of his impending death, wrote a goodbye message saying that he had a happy life and he took a final photo of himself which captured a look of peace.

Epilogue

Krakauer accompanies McCandless’s parents as they travel to the site of their son’s death. While there, they look over his possessions, leaving a plaque memorializing his death as well as a note urging runaways to contact their families. Both parents tell Krakauer that they are glad they made the trip, and McCandless’s mother states that she might have found McCandless’s decision to live in the wild admirable if he had not died.

Read a full Summary & Analysis of Chapter 18 & the Epilogue

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