Into The Wild Essay

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Maple Gonzales
Mrs. Flowers
CSU ERWC
27 February 2015
Prompt 2: You Only Live Once Most people live by the saying “YOLO”, but Chris McCandless took it to the next level.
In the story, “
Into The Wild
” by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless goes on an extreme journey that ended up being a tragic story. McCandless is not a foolish person for doing what he wanted to do with his life because we are all born to do different things, be different people. His adventure was a getaway, “Two years he walks the earth, no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.
Escaped from Atlanta.” (McCandless qtd in Krakauer 163).
His journey was an eye opening, better and crazy, in a good way, view of life and that is to live with excitement and to not just exist. One says he is foolish and another insists he is not, McCandless shouldn’t be seen as this man who did something terribly wrong when it was his dream. We can not stop someone from following their dream, we simply let them be and focus on our own.
Even though Chris McCandless’s Alaskan adventure ended in starvation which lead to death, he came a long way with following his dream and that showed a lot about him as a person.
He writes his last post card before his Alaskan adventure to a man who fed and housed him,
Wayne Westerberg, “Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return to the South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t hear from me ever again,

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I want you to know that you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.” (McCandless qtd in
Krakauer 69). His acknowledgement on how risky his adventure is and what situation he is putting himself in does not make him arrogant or ignorant, he made his dream seem like an essential thing for him, something he really wanted to do and put forth in reaching the end, regardless of the consequences. In spite the fact that McCandless is aware that the adventure he wants to pull off is dangerous, he still goes on with it because he realizes how much of a worth it is. Being courageous like Chris will help one conquer a venturesome act.
If one wants to live life the right way, one should be adventurous and explore the different parts of it. In July it gets hot, the temperatures are extremely high, “McCandless tramped around the west for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and power of the
landscape…”

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