Into The Wild Journal 3

Before I began reading this book I knew that it would contain very complex and seductive philosophical ideas about nature and freedom and happiness, this is why I was so excited to read it in the first place. By telling McCandless' story and the stories of people like him, this book depicts what can happen when people follow that desire that I suspect everyone has to be completely and genuinely free. Free from society, responsibility, the meaninglessness of living according to the rules of a mundane reality. This book allows everyone who so wants to experience something greater than what they know, to imagine the beauty that the people in this book find when they immerse themselves in nature and experience ultimate freedom. Up until this most recent section, this book has mostly focused on what people like McCandless found on their voyages, but this latest section has focused on the kind of people they were that allowed them to follow their desires. The author has now begun to share his own experiences and the similarities between himself and McCandless. The book has become a lot more tragic now because, not only does the author share the dark side of his own experience with this kind of lifestyle, but he talks to McCandless' family and finds the darkness in Chris's life. In order for both Chris and the author to find what they thought they were looking for, they had to cut all human relationships. Chris's family hadn't heard from him for two years before they heard he had died this left a huge hole in all of them that caused immense pain they still experience today. Chris did this because he was passionately resentful of his parents and therefore believed he owed them nothing, this shows that he was probably in pain as well because if he wasn't, he probably would have talked about his family with more indifference instead of anger. The author talks about the loneliness he suffered with on his excursions and how this taught him about the beauty that exists in the mundane which he was blind to before.