McCandless: living against the tide

One of the stories included in The Dark Night of the Soul is the one about Chris McCandles. This story became famous thanks to  Jon Krakauer who made it public through his book Into the Wild.

Coming from a well-to-do background in the Washington D.C. area, McCandless always had privileges that few can claim. McCandless was just entering society, having graduated from Emory University, with more than $25,000 in savings and a family that loved him. The question of why he would completely break contact with all that he knew, give away everything he owned, and disappear to the Alaskan wilderness as a homeless man for two years drives Krakauer’s work.

What fascinated Krakauer about McCandless was his capacity to go into the wilderness to explore himself and to get to know him. However, this is not what moved Miller to choose McCandless’ story to include it in The Dark Night of the Soul and this is not either what has moved me to incorporate it in this second part of my project. While Miller uses McCandless as an example which proves that “there continue to be readers who invest the activities of reading and writing with great significance”, I see McCandless as the type of person who gets tired of life and decides to live against the tide. I see McCandless as a person that is not happy with life because he is not happy with himself. For me it is not normal to suddenly start to hate everything that surrounds you: family, life style, money, studies… specially when your life is the type of life everyone would dream of. McCandless gets to the point where he doesn’t want that any more so he decides to leave everything behind and to start a new life. However, while some like Krakauer see this act as worthy of admiration I see it as the example of someone unable to find happiness in life due to having a complex personality. Another fact which supports my idea is that when reading Krakauer’s book, Into the Wild, you get the feeling that even though McCandless has started the life he wanted he is still not happy and  he tries to cover his unhappiness with his obsession about getting to Alaska.

But, what was the reason which explained McCandless’ unhappiness and behavior? I believe that there is always a reason behind big changes in life such as the one made by McCandless and it was not until I was further into the book when I discovered that what motivated McCandless to start a new life and leave his behind was the discovery of his father’s double life which lead McCandless thinking about his entire childhood as a fiction. So when raising the question “what makes us become distrustful? What makes us become the second type of person described in my home page? The answer is “realizing that something that you have trusted during your entire life is a completely lie”. When people experience this type of shocking events in their lives, they start to doubt everything. They don’t trust anyone any more. They live against the tide and have complex personalities. They don’t believe anything they see. They don’t believe anything they hear and they even question what they read. This type of person, this type of reader is what I call a “wary reader”.