Literary Analysis of Chris McCandles Story

By: Julia Glotfelty

Chris McCandles has a very different story than most. His story is about finding happiness
throughout the nature that we live in. The book Into the Wild was a great representation of
Chris’s life because it gives the facts of his story throughout interviews and letters from the
people that Chris interacted with along his way to Alaska.

The movie that was made in tribute to Chirs McCandles journey gave us the emotion that Chris
and his peers might have gone through. The story about Chris’ life was interpreted by a book
and a movie both called “Into The Wild''. While they each use pathos (writings that make you
feel emotions) and logos (fact based writings), the novel uses more logos than the movie which
uses more pathos. The book states the facts of Chris McCandles's journey, while the movie
wants to make us have empathy for Chris McCandles life. Throughout this essay I will be talking
about how both of these interpretations and how they both made me feel.

The book and the movie “Into the Wild” have all three aristilean appeals (ethos, logos and
pathos.) The main ones that I want to focus on are logos and pathos. While I was listening and
watching these two different perspectives on Chris's life I realized that both wanted to tell an
impactful story about Chris McCandles, but the way that they told them was different. The book
wanted to show us the intertextual facts about his life, while the movie wanted to show the
emotional path that his story took.

Into The Wild written by Jon Krakauer is a National Bestseller book. Jon Krakauer is a freelance
journalist, but this book originated when he wrote an article about Chris’s story that was
published in Outside Magazine. Jon’s background as a journalist created a story with little to no
opinion from his point of view, he did let a few of his opinions slip through the cracks. I believe
his sharing of his opinions added more to the story.

What Jon accomplished in this book was he gave us the story about Chris McCandles’s journey
by letting us decide if this was a great story or not, letting us decide if Chris lived a meaningful
life or not.

“In the weeks and months following the publication of the article in Outside, it generated more
mail than any other article in the magazine's history. This correspondence, as one might expect,
reflected sharply divergent points of view: Some readers admired the boy immensely for his
courage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist
who perished out of arrogance and stupidity—and was undeserving of the considerable media
attention he received. My convictions should be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the
reader to form his or her own opinion of Chris McCandless.” (Jon Krakauer). I felt that it was
necessary to put this whole quote in here because it tells us that there are alot more points of
view than I would have thought were possible. The piece of the quote that I wanted to highlight
was the last sentence because I believe it shows my point exactly “My convictions should be
apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his or her own opinion of Chris
McCandless'' really indicates that Jon wanted a factual story to let the reader decide on this
volatile issue.

While the book gives more information (logos) about Chris's journey, the movie interpretation
of Into the Wild was made by director and screenwriter Sean Penn who had a different
approach. I believe he made it to have more emotion toward Chris’s plight. A scene that comes
to mind that shows this is when Ronald Franz (a character in the movie) tried to adopt Chris. In
the book Ronald said “At one point Franz dared to make a special request of McCandless: "My
mother was an only child," he explains. "So was my father. And I was their only child. Now that
my own boy's dead, I'm at the end of the line. When I'm gone, my family will be finished, gone
forever. So I asked Alex if I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson."” While both the book
and the movie had the same exact quote from Ronald - the movie was more impactful. When I
read this in the book I thought nothing of it, I believed that it was just a small part of the bigger
picture. On the contrary, this scene in the movie made me feel a lot of strong emotions while
watching this scene: sadness, regret, disappointment. Watching this scene in real life (the
movie) really made me understand how hard it was for Ronald to say what he said, and then
how sad and final it was for Chris to reject Ronald’s request.

I understood the book better after watching the movie. The visual impact of the moving, and
hearing the emotion in the movie characters' voices created more empathy in me towards
Chris. I am dyslexic and sometimes infliction in written words escapes me when reading. I get
much more from visual and auditory presentations, also the book was not intended to convey
emotion.