Into the Wild

Passion, privilege, and isolation relates to what we are doing and intersects with the book "Into the Wild." Chris McCandless is our main character in this book. He goes on an adventure from Atlanta to Stempede Trail, Alaska and dies of starvation. I have found 3 things that he has in common with what we are doing in class. The first one is passion. Chris is very passionate about leaving his family's home and not talking to his parents. He decides to take on the road with his car and travel. He has odd jobs now and then and soon his car dies on him. He either will stay with friends but it just fine roughing it out with others just like him. He soon got it in his head to go to Alaska and live on the land. This was his goal and nothing was going to stop him from getting there. He was only 24 when he passed away but I think he was happy because he did what he wanted to do. He died all alone with just his books. Even though people warned him that it is very tough to live up there and there is hardly any food he didn't care he wanted to do this.


Privilege; I think Chris is definitely privileged. He was a white male with an education with a rich family. He felt that he had no need for responsibility and did whatever he wanted and didn't care that his family missed him. He had the privilege of hitchhiking which isn't advisable to women because they could get kidnapped, raped, and/or could die. He also thought that everything could/would work out just fine. He took everything very lightly and I felt to a certain extent that he just didn't care. He didn't want to be close to people and kept them at an arms length. He didn't call his sister, who he was very close with and it seemed very selfish on his part not to. When someone did feel close to Chris they were the ones hurt at the end because he always left. He didn't want to get too attached to the people that helped him since he was going to be leaving them, I think if that was the case he shouldn't accept their help.

Isolation; Chris isolated himself from society and their rules. He decided to leave off the grid and wanted to live off the land. He wanted to be totally alone from human contact. He ultimately got what he wanted. The sad thing is that he died alone but he did get to live out his dream and live off the land for a few months.