75 pages • 2 hours read
Jon KrakauerInto The Wild
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Carthage”
McCandless arrives at Wayne Westerberg’s grain elevator in Carthage and tells him that he’s ready to work. He stays for four weeks, long enough to make some money to buy new gear. He does difficult, dirty jobs and grows close to Westerberg’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Gail Borah. People in Carthage appreciate his company, and he receives mail from others he’s met during his travels. He tells Westerberg and Borah that he plans on returning to South Dakota in the fall after his trip to Alaska.
Two nights before leaving for Alaska, McCandless is invited to Westerberg’s mother’s house for dinner. Although Westerberg’s mother hadn’t expected to get along with her son’s hired help, she and McCandless get along well, and they spend the night talking to one another. On his final night in Carthage, he goes out drinking and partying with Westerberg’s work crew at a local bar.
On April 15 McCandless says goodbye to his coworkers at the grain elevator. Borah notes that he is crying. He writes Westerberg two postcards in the weeks that follow, indicating that he made it to Alaska and is beginning his journey “into the wild” (69).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Alaska”
Many Alaskans wrote to Krakauer expressing that they thought McCandless did not deserve praise or recognition after Krakauer’s Outside magazine article was published. They felt McCandless was ill-prepared and ignorant. Many such ill-prepared people had come to Alaska “to find answers” (72), only to meet tragedy or death. One Alaskan legend is that of the Mayor of Hippie Cove, a man named Gene Rosellini, who arrived in Cordova, Alaska, in 1977. Rosellini attempted to live in the wild without the aid of modern technology. He crafted his own tools and lived off of roots, berries, and hunted game. After 10 years of primitive living, Rosellini decided that it was essentially impossible for human beings to live off the land in such a manner. In November 1991 Rosellini was found dead in his shack, having stabbed himself with a knife.
Another Alaskan Legend is that of climber John Waterman. Waterman had established himself as a promising climbing talent growing up. In 1978 he became to first person to successfully summit Mt. Hunter; the climb took him 145 days. Although he was celebrated for his accomplishment, Waterman began to lose his mental stability afterward. A fire destroyed his equipment and a collection of notes and poetry that was extremely important to him. As a result of the loss, he committed himself to a psychiatric institution but left only two weeks later. Eventually he decided to climb Denali without sufficient gear or food, likely bent on suicide. He was never seen again.
In the 1970s a Texan named Carl McCunn moved to Fairbanks. In 1981 he hired a pilot to fly him to a remote lake in the Brooks Range, but he forgot to arrange a return date with the pilot. As winter advanced, McCunn grew colder and his food rations grew low. A pilot flew over his cabin, but he accidentally gave the pilot the signal that he was OK and needed no assistance. As McCunn drew nearer to death by starvation, he shot and killed himself.
Krakauer claims that there are similarities between McCunn, Rosellini, Waterman, and McCandless, but he insists that McCandless distinguished himself from these legends. He wasn’t entirely “incompetent” (85), since he survived for almost four months in the Alaskan backcountry, nor was he a “sociopath” (85). Instead, he was more like Everett Ruess, a man who walked into the Utah desert in 1934 and never returned.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Davis Gulch”
Davis Gulch is a watershed in Utah where the Anasazi used to dwell. Although the land around the gulch is sandy and barren, diverse vegetation blooms inside the canyon. A 20-year-old named Everett Ruess carved the words “NEMO 1934” on the canyon walls here and disappeared shortly afterward, never to be seen again.
Born in Oakland, California, Ruess moved frequently growing up. He went to high school in Los Angeles, traveled to Yosemite and Big Sur, and at age 16 befriended the photographer Edward Weston. After earning his high school diploma, Ruess traveled around the Southwest, visiting sights such as Escalante, Zion Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. He had a strong passion for being in the natural world.
The letters Ruess wrote to his friends during his travels are very similar to the ones Chris McCandless wrote. They both took great risks during their trips. In one letter Ruess writes that he found himself on unstable sandstone cliffs “hundreds of times” (92) and encountered bulls and bees that nearly killed him. Ruess also took up a new name during his travels, just as McCandless did.
Ruess was last seen north of Davis Gulch in 1934. Three months into his disappearance, a search party was sent out for him. They found graffiti written by Ruess but did not recover his body. There are different theories as to how Ruess died. Some believe he was murdered, while others believe he fell to his death from a cliff. A knowledgeable man from Escalante named Ken Sleight believed Ruess drowned.
Examining the history of the papar (a group of Irish monks) might further contextualize Chris McCandless’s life and death. The monks sailed from Ireland to an island off the coast of Iceland in the fifth or sixth century. The voyage was dangerous, and many monks died. They risked their lives simply to reach the isolated land where they could live in peace. In this way they were similar to Chris McCandless.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In Chapter 7 we reach the end of McCandless’s travels around the continental United States and the beginning of his trek up to Alaska. Rather than continuing McCandless’s story, however, Krakauer pulls back in Chapters 8 and 9 to describe the feats and failures of historical figures which might provide context for McCandless’s motivations. In Chapter 8 Krakauer describes three legends who came to Alaska and met tragedy. One of these legends, climber John Waterman, was severely mentally unstable and likely had suicidal intentions when he headed into the mountains unprepared. Texan Carl McCunn did not have suicidal intentions when he went into the remote wilderness, but he had not prepared well and was largely incompetent. Krakauer includes these figures to contrast them with McCandless, who was neither suicidal like Waterman nor as incompetent as McCunn. Instead, Krakauer makes the case in Chapter 9 that McCandless was more like Everett Ruess, who loved solitude, nature, and traveling, and frequently took life-threatening risks.
There is a large difference between a man like Ruess and men like McCunn and Waterman. Ruess was filled with life, even in the last letter he ever wrote. In that letter Ruess wrote to his brother, “I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time” (87). As opposed to Waterman, who became disillusioned after the success of an important climb, Ruess’s appreciation for the outdoors seemed only to increase until the end of his life. As Wallace Stegner says, “what Everett Ruess was after was beauty” (87). The papar monks whom Krakauer cites sought similarly idealistic spiritual goals in their dangerous journey from Ireland to Iceland.
McCandless had much more in common with Ruess and the Irish monks than he did with Waterman and McCunn. Like Ruess, McCandless was filled with passion for the outdoors, and he sought life and beauty instead of death. Like the monks, McCandless’s dangerous journey was motivated by spiritual reasons. By comparing McCandless to such figures, Krakauer provides one more lens by which to understand and empathize with him.
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