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Krakauer’s Belief in McCandless

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The day is unlike any other. The mail has come and lying at the bottom of the stack is the favored Outside magazine. The headline reads, “Exclusive Report: Lost in the Wild.” The cover speaks of a twenty four year old boy who “walked off into America’s Last Frontier hoping to make sense of his life.” The monotony of the ordinary day has now vanished from thought as Jon Krakauer’s captivating article runs through the mind like gasoline to an engine. The article is not soon forgotten, and the book Into the Wild is happened upon three years later. The book relates the full story of Christopher Johnson McCandless and how he left his family and friends after graduating college in order to find himself. Krakauer based the book off of his article …show more content…

This acknowledgement is based on assumption, but it is very sound assumption. No one truly knows how Chris McCandless died. Krakauer thinks that McCandless’ cause of death was possibly a mold known as R. leguminicola which may have contaminated his seeds. Out of all the possible causes of death, this cause seems to be the most plausible. If Krakauer’s thought was the cause of McCandless’ death, it would prove that McCandless was not “a reckless idiot” (iii). Rather it shows that “McCandless simply had the misfortune to eat moldy seeds” (194). This also means that “he didn’t carelessly confuse one species with another” and that “the guy wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he [had] been made out to be” (194). Other theories as to how McCandless died include the possibility of eating a poisonous potato plant or even the toxicity from a wild plant’s seeds. The fact that makes Krakauer’s idea the most plausible is he is able to go through each of the theories and logically assess the given facts until he has made it seem as if that particular theory was not even possible to begin with. All of the other theories that the reader is presented with have one thing in common. In order to be true, they require that McCandless be “a reckless idiot” (iii). However, Krakauer breaks down every other plausible death theory until there is only one left. Coincidentally it is the only theory that, if true, would prove that McCandless was

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