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The Natural Death of Alexander Supertramp: Ecological Selfhood and the Freudian Rhetoric of Into the Wild

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isy086

1759-1090

Alexander Menrisky,

Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies

In the summer of 1990, Christopher McCandless left his apartment near Emory University after quietly donating his savings to charity. Over two years later, his body was found decomposing in an abandoned bus in the forest south of Denali in Alaska. Four years after that, Jon Krakauer published Into the Wild (1996), which details McCandless’ cross-country travels and outlines a cultural narrative that Krakauer suggests made the young man’s stringent belief in a firm dualism between nature and civilization possible. The Alaskan bush, McCandless believes, represents a harmony within ecology somehow devoid of cultural influence, a wilderness somehow free of ideology. In Alaska, he is “free from society at last” (McCandless 175), able to begin his “real life” (Krakauer 168). Krakauer himself, however, appears to reject the dualism McCandless employs to distinguish between nature and culture, “real life” and artifice. He challenges McCandless’ perceptions, questioning “the powerful cultural myth of the need or even possibility of being ‘alone’ in nature, underscoring the ways one’s travels are always performed in relation to others” (Keirstead 296). Into the Wild foregrounds Krakauer’s own awareness of the ways in which nature and culture, or the human and nonhuman, are not neatly divisible spheres, and positions Krakauer and McCandless—both of whose characters are to a great extent pieced together by uncertain clues and memories—in dialog.