Here are two papers that do a good job explaining the significance of the selected passage. Read each one and comment on them. Discuss the strengths, areas for improvement, and anything you can take to your own writing to improve it, based on the previous comments.
Paper 1:
page 64"Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt's need to exert control and Chris's extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt's authority through high school and college to a surprising degree, but the boy raged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he perceived to be his father's moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parent's lifestyle, the tyranny of their conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled - and when he finally did, it was with characteristic immoderation.Shortly before he disappeared, Chris complained to Carine that their parents' behavior was "so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful and insulting that I finally passed my breaking point." He went on: Since they won't ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation I'm going to let them think they are right, I'm going to let them think that I'm "coming around to see their side of things" and that our relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt swift action I'm going to completely knock them out of my life. I'm going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live. I'll be through with them once and for all, forever."Family IssuesJon Krakauer's Into the Wild is about a young man named Chris McCandless who, after college, goes off on his own into the western wilderness and dies on a trip to Alaska. While in the west, Chris rarely mentions his family or other facts about his personal background. The people he meets ask him about his life and his family, but Chris reveals little. Throughout the book, the reader has to ask "What was Chris's family like? Didn't he feel bad about leaving his family?" In this passage from page sixty-four, Krakauer provides insight into the relationship between Chris and his family, especially his father, and to help portray Chris's inner emotions he uses strong, negative words.The first two sentences of the passage compare and contrast the characteristics of Chris and his father to show why they didn't have a good relationship. Krakauer describes the pair as "stubborn and high-strung". Chris seems like a good person, without many serious flaws. However, this phrase implies that Walt and Chris, not just Walt, had less than perfect qualities. The author then goes on to say that Walt needed to "exert control" while Chris was "independent". Walt wanted Chris to do what he wanted him to do. He wanted Chris to take the path in life that he felt was the right one. Chris wanted to shape his life by his own desires. He didn't want to do exactly what his father expected. Their personalities clashed and "polarization was inevitable". There was no possible way for Chris to live with his controlling father, so their relationship declined and Chris separated himself from Walt. The reader can now see that Chris did not get along with his father, but it wasn't just their differences in personalities that drove them apart.The following two sentences delve into Chris's actions and inner feelings toward his father. While in school, he "submitted to Walt's authority...to a surprising degree". Chris did what he was told even though it was against his "independent nature" while he was living with his parents or using some of his parent's money. The author says that Chris did so "to a surprising degree". From this phrase, the reader can infer that Chris didn't usually do exactly as he was expected to. During this time, Chris "raged inwardly". Chris did not want to do what his father told him. He seemed calm from the outside, but he was really very angry with his father. Chris "brooded" over Walt's "moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parent's lifestyle, the tyranny of their conditional love". Chris would dwell on his father's mistakes and his "hypocrisy". He felt oppressed by the knowledge that his parents loved him when he did as they instructed. Here, Krakauer uses words like "moral shortcomings", "hypocrisy" and "tyranny" to emphasize how Chris felt about his parents. Chris didn't just feel that his parents were too controlling, like many adolescents. He saw them as tyrants and hypocrites who had faults in their sense of right and wrong. Chris felt that they were an oppressive power and were trying to hold him down. Even though he felt this way when he was younger, Chris obeyed his parents anyway; however, this changed as he grew older.The last sentence of this paragraph describes the effect of Walt's authority and transitions into Chris's own account of his parents. After spending his life under his controlling father, "Chris rebelled". He could no longer live under Walt's power, so he went against his father's wishes. He didn't go to law school, like his parents thought he would, but instead traveled west. Krakauer says that Chris's rebellion was of "characteristic immoderation". Chris wasn't a person who, to rebel from his family, would decide to start a career in something completely different than his parents wanted. For his rebellion, Chris went to an extreme which is described in the last paragraph.The final section contains an excerpt from a letter from Chris to his sister, Carine, about how he plans to stage his rebellion. Chris felt that his parents were "irrational", "oppressive", "disrespectful and insulting". He saw his parents in a very negative way, so he decided to defy them. He tells Carine "I'm going to let them think...our relationship is stabilizing". Chris let his parents think that he was going to be rational and do what they thought was best for him. He continues, saying that with "abrupt swift action" he will "completely knock them out of my life". He will "divorce them as his parents". Chris plans to, without warning, separate himself from his parents completely. He wants nothing to do with Walt and Billie. Chris repeatedly uses phrases such as "once and for all" and "forever". These words show that he never planned to see or contact his parents again. At one point, he refers to his parents as "idiots". Here, the reader can be certain that Chris despises his parents. Chris was sick of his parents and, in response, planned a permanent separation from them. Krakauer shows the reader, in this portion, how Chris felt by letting them read Chris's own words.This passage is significant because it is one of the first sections that the reader encounters that shows what Chris's family relationships were like. Walt tried to control Chris's life and Chris hated him for it. Because he felt his parents were oppressive, Chris decided to sever ties with his family forever. Chris's feelings are emphasized by terms that are very strong because that is how his personality is. Chris sees things in black and white with no grays and his parents are not exempt from this way of thinking. One of the most pressing questions of this text is "Why did Chris leave home?" A possible answer is that the domineering nature of his parents was too much for him to deal with and his inner anger forced him to take off..
Paper 2:
"I got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last big adventure," Westerberg offers, "and that he'wanted to settle down some. He said he was going to write a book about his travels. He liked Carthage. With his education, nobody thought he was going to work at a goddamn. grain elevator the rest of his life. But he definitely intended to come back here for a while, help us out at the elevator, figure out what he was going to do next." That spring, however, McCandless's sights were fixed unflinchingly on Alaska. He talked about the trip at every opportunity. He sought out experienced hunters around town and asked them for tips about stalking game, dressing animals, curing meat. Borah drove him to the Kmart in Mitchell to shop for some last pieces of gear. By mid-April, Westerberg was both shorthanded and very busy, so he asked McCandless to postpone his departure andwork a week or two longer. McCandless wouldn't even consider it. "Once Alex made up his mind about something, there was no changing it," Westerberg laments. "I even offered to buy him a plane ticket to Fairbanks, which would have let him work an extra ten days and still get to Alaska by the end of April, but he said, `No, I want to hitch north. Flying would be cheating. It would wreck the whole trip.' "(Krakauer,66-67)Into the TextIn September of 1992, the frozen body of Chris McCandless was found in his camp in the Alaskan wilderness. Many who heard of the death immediately assumed that McCandless had been insane. After all, he had ventured into Alaska with only some camping equipment, a gun, a large bag of rice, and a survival guide; surely no sane person would have gone to live an isolated life in Alaska with such inadequate supplies. When Jon Krakauer wrote Into The Wild in 1995, one of his main focuses was to dispel the myth of McCandless as an unprepared kook. “When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey…”(Krakauer), Krakauer has asserted. In writing the selected passage on pages 66-67, the author seeks to convince the reader that Chris McCandless was not only entirely sane and well-prepared for his journey, but was also a very intelligent and philosophical individual.When Chris went into Alaska, he was not a fool who expected to be able to figure out how to live in the wilderness once he got there. Before leaving for Alaska, McCandless had, “…sought out experienced hunters around town and asked them for tips about stalking game, dressing animals, curing meat,”(Krakauer, 12-13). Evidently, McCandless was no nut who went into his adventure thinking that by living in harmony with nature, nature would feed him like a mother feeding her child. He knew that if he wanted to eat, he would have to know how to take his food from the wilderness and fight for every morsel. McCandless did not view his adventure as an idealistic communion with nature, but as a rigorous, dangerous test of his individual strength. Krakauer also wanted to show that McCandless was not suicidal, as some have suggested. If McCandless wanted to die in Alaska, he would not have prepared himself so thoroughly for the adventure. If he wanted to die there, he would have learned nothing about survival and gone to Alaska with no supplies but the clothes on his back. Chris McCandless was far from a suicidal man or a lunatic, but was instead very prepared had a realistic view of his adventure and wanted to see it through to the end.Chris not only had a full understanding of the rigors he would face in Alaska, but he also found appeal in Alaska as being the most difficult of tests; and he was determined to complete this test by himself. Krakauer proves this by showing that Chris actually rejected any offer of help in completing his trip. When Wayne Westerberg, an employer and friend of McCandless’s, offers to buy Chris a plane ticket to Alaska, Chris replies, “ ‘No, I want to hitch north. Flying would be cheating,’ ”(Krakauer, 23). Chris rejected that ride for two reasons: first, taking a plane ride to Alaska seemed to Chris like climbing Mt. Everest in an elevator; second, he didn’t want to accept a favor from Westerberg or anyone else. In other words, if Chris depends on any person for anything or accepts any convenience, he cannot know for sure that he would have been strong enough to have done it by himself. Krakauer uses the fact that McCandless had a full, cogent philosophy behind his actions to prove that McCandless was not merely a crazy person living in the woods. He was an intelligent individual who wanted to prove his worth by facing whatever difficulties the wilderness could throw at him. Krakauer has also provided the reader with the impressions McCandless’ friends had of him in order to further prove that McCandless was of sound mind. “‘I got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last big adventure…and that he wanted to settle down some,’”(Krakauer, 1-3) Westerberg is quoted as saying. Westerberg seems to have been rather convinced that Chris would live through his journey. Westerberg goes on to claim that “’[Chris] definitely intended to come back here for a while…’”(Krakauer, 6). If Westerberg knew what Chris’s plans were for after the adventure and allowed Chris to embark upon it, clearly Chris had convinced Westerberg that he was well prepared for his journey and was very likely to survive it. Anyone can start telling his friends that he is about to leave to live in the Alaskan wilderness, but it takes a special kind of individual to tell his friends that he will live in the wilderness and actually convince them to believe that he will be capable of coming back alive. Such an individual must prove, through actions or character, that he has the strength to survive the trip. Chris McCandless must have somehow proven himself to Westerberg. As Krakauer shows, Chris was not a person who had any illusions about what he was getting himself into; even his friends will confirm that he appeared to be capable of life in the wilderness.The Chris McCandless Krakauer portrays is a fascinating young man. Perhaps the greatest difference between the Chris McCandless seen by Krakauer and the McCandless seen by those who assume that he is just a inexperienced fool who got himself in over his head is that the former sees McCandless in many dimensions while the latter sees him in one dimension. Krakauer tries to paint a detailed picture of McCandless by providing the reader with plenty of evidence which shows the depth of McCandless’s preparedness. This evidence comes both from the actions of Chris McCandless and the accounts of Westerberg and others who knew Chris. By giving the reader this information, Krakauer hopes to prevent the reader from taking the one-dimensional view of McCandless (that is, that he was just a loony.) Instead, Krakauer proves to the reader that Chris McCandless was an intelligent person who knew the challenges ahead of him and was fully prepared for them. Chris McCandless may have been headstrong and single-minded, but he cannot be accused of being a fool.
