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Comparing Characters of Ellen Foster and Into the Wild

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Comparing Characters of Ellen Foster and Into the Wild The raging cold screams against his back at night. Her father's drunken jeers make her shiver as she cowers in the corner of her room. Both have natural families, yet both have been driven to flee from these families. She flees because her life amongst family is terrifying, loveless, and oppressive. He flees because he believes that his family has grown arrogant and materialistic, and is thus oppressive as well. She is the title character of Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster, and he is Chris McCandless, a real young man portrayed by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. In their respective stories, Ellen and Chris both find themselves on their own, each taking a journey farther and …show more content…

Plus, she is only a child and realizes that she is relatively powerless against him. As a result, Ellen does the only thing she can: She goes to sleep beside her dying mother. She may not say it herself, but Ellen loves her mother. By sleeping beside her dead mother, the heartbreaking picture of childhood innocence, Ellen is attempting to hold on in the only way she can. When she stays for a short time with her Aunt Betsy, she assumes she is staying with her forever; the same holds true when she is in the temporary care of her art teacher. Eventually, Ellen's desire for a family becomes so strong that she petitions a foster mother herself, journeying to the woman's house and even offering her money. Ellen's past living situations all included a house in which she lived, but now she has truly found the family she needs and cherishes. Chris McCandless is a wolf without a pack. According to his family, he had always been prone to straying from his family and friends, even going as far as to take a solo road trip across the country the summer after his high school graduation. During his last year in college, he lived without a telephone and had not attempted to contact his family very often. In Into the Wild Krakauer reports that after Chris graduates from college, he was "unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers. . . a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence" (22). After his

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