Still, Christopher McCandless charmed the inhabitants of Carthage. Along with Wayne Westerberg, he also established deep friendships with Westerberg’s mother and long-time girlfriend. Westerberg told Krakauer, “There was something fascinating about him . . . He was hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs.”

Analysis

Regarding McCandless’s character, it is interesting — and of course believable — that he can be intelligent, hardworking, and resilient, yet lack mechanical dexterity and perhaps even common sense. While the former characteristic, his awkwardness with machines, is consequential in ways that he manages to recover from (as in the abandonment of his car), the latter, his difficulty being just plain sensible, will have a greater impact.

McCandless’s rage toward his parents, and particularly his father, is something that many of those who meet him pick up on. It seems to be their lifestyle more than anything else that McCandless is rejecting when he flees the conventional middle-class American way of life, though why it so repels him is never made completely clear by Into the Wild. It is not uncommon for men and women of Christopher McCandless’s age to flee their parents’ particular ways of doing things (psychology even has a term for this dynamic: reaction formation), but rarely is the response so extreme, so complete. The degree of McCandless’s renunciation of his family’s values is a large part of what makes Krakauer’s book so fascinating.

Finally, there is something admirable about McCandless’s utter devotion to what he believes in. It is easy to be inspired by books and the ideas they espouse, but not so easy to live the kind of life envisioned by thinkers like Tolstoy and London. McCandless “talks the talk” in a way that alienates fewer listeners than one would predict, but he “walks the walk,” too — which may account for the fact that so many of those he encountered continued to listen.