This past week I began re-reading one of my favorite books Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer. The novel is based on the story of Christopher McCandless, a man from a well-off East Coast family who, after graduating from Emory University in 1990, disappeared. He changed his name to Alexander Supertramp, gave away all of his savings to charity, and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he walked alone into the Northern wilderness in April 1992. Four months later his partially decomposed body was found by moose hunters.

For years now this has been one of my favorite books, and I never considered the fact that it had to be reconstructed by the author because little was known about Chris McCandless’ journey to Alaska and how he died. His story has nonetheless been an inspiration for many nature-lovers who admire what he did, despite his death. The coroner’s report said that he probably died from starvation, but in Into The Wild Krakauer hypothesizes that he passed away from mistakenly eating seeds of the wild pea plant rather than potato plant, the latter of which was nontoxic. Recent findings, however, found this to be untrue: McCandless’ death was caused by a neurotoxin in the sweet pea plant which affects different people differently but “those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very limited calories,” which definitely describes the state Christopher McCandless was in before he died.

Krakauer’s mission to write the book began after he was asked to write an article for Outside magazine about the death of Chris McCandless. It was after writing this article that Krakauer began retracing McCandless’ two-year path from Atlanta to Alaska, reading his intricate diaries and examining the photographs and self-portraits he took. Though much of it is backed up by evidence provided by McCandless’ personal affairs, we will never know exactly what happened to him in his final days, as he was so weak he was barely able to write.

This leads me to question author construction of a story, which my group talked about in our presentation on Dave Eggers’ What Is The What. The two stories differ in that Krakauer had to use information he found about McCandless, whereas Eggers’ interviewed and talked to Valentino Achak Deng for hours and hours in order to get his story right. Deng also had the ability to view the book and agree with the way his story was portrayed, while McCandless’ death was really the reason the book was written. In the case of narratives being written and portrayed by outside sources, it is always important to consider who the author is writing it for. For example, although the film God Grew Tired Of Us is about the Lost Boys and Sudan, how they grew up during a civil war, and all of the atrocities they saw, it is also about how Americans saved them and the ways they helped them once the Lost Boys got to America. Many people see this as a way to appeal to a Western audience and shows the perceived superiority of Western culture. While Into The Wild is the story of a young American adult male, its reason for being written is still questioned by the public. In a recent article written by Krakauer, he tells what his readers have sent him about the book.

“I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I’ve also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death.”

One detractor, Craig Medred, believes that Krakauer puts too much emphasis on the “what” that killed McCandless instead of the “who;’ McCandless was, after all, an inexperienced man who took to the wilderness with inadequate equipment. He also believes that Krakauer took his story and made him a celebrity and that he “wanted to write a story that would sell.”

So, as I read this book again for the tenth time or so, I wonder who is right. I know that the story of Christopher McCandless would never be so popular and well-known had Jon Krakauer not made it into a novel, yet I now question his reasons for writing it the way he did. Was McCandless the valiant hero who rejected societal ideals and simply made a fatal mistake or was the unprepared, suicidal character that detractors of the book believe he was? The truth is, we may never know.