Comparing 'Into The Wild And The Grizzly Man'

Chris Caron
Mr. Bain
English 3
27 October 2015
Into the Wild and The Grizzly Man Essay
Being separated from your whole family and friends can sometimes be a very hard thing for people to go through. In the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless changed his life and left the only place he had ever known to go live in the wild alone. In the wild, he had risked his life through many adventures and was found stranded on a bus starved to death after he had no one to help him. While in The Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and dedicated his life to the wild bears and felt that they needed someone to take care of them. He felt that he and the bears really connected and …show more content…

Chris McCandless related through his journal entries to his friends that he made along the way and to his sister Carine. While Timothy Treadwell relates through his interviews on his camera of his life in Alaska with the wild bears.In the movie The Grizzly Man, and the book Into the Wild, the two authors portray the characters to be outcasts in society as they experience a world different from their own. If both authors portray Timothy Treadwell and Chris McCandless to be outcasts in society, then they both can be related because they lived a similar life in the wild. They both went for different reasons but ended with the same outcome of death. Treadwell’s life in the wild was much like McCandless’ because they both lived alone most of the time and used what they had around them to connect back to the real world. Timothy used his camera and had interviews with himself about what life was like and how much he was enjoying his time with the presence of the bears around him. The bears didn’t seem to intimidate him at any time and his ignorance led him to a violent death to the bear. Chris …show more content…

Timothy Treadwell had a very large passion for bears. Not only did he know that at any time they could kill whatever is in their path but he knew that he was always in danger. Werner Herzog illustrates this kind of danger through the interviews of Timothy Treadwell, early in the movie, he is interviewing a bear and he says, “I met him on the path the other day after feeling sorry for him, thinking that he was a bit thin, and he probably charged me with the intent to probably strike.” Timothy Treadwell knows that he is in much danger but still feels that the wild is the right place for him. He lives out there with the bears for the last 13 summers of his life because he felt it was the right thing to do. Anyone with a right mind wouldn’t go and live with bears for a whole summer and consider them as their friends because they are one of the most dangerous animals in the world. In The book Into the Wild, Chris McCandless demonstrates his love for the wild when he says, “If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life, you will see its full meaning and it’s incredible beauty.” (57). Obviously, McCandless connects to nature very well because he thinks that you can find your