What Jon describes in these pages shocked me. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.’ In this section, Jon is telling the reader the travels of McCandless. McCandless was stirred by the austerity of this landscape, by its saline beauty. Emasculated by dams and diversion canals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to reservoir through some of the hottest, starkest country on the continent.
INTO THE WILD BOOK FULL TEXT TORRENT
While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminum canoe for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south, across the border with Mexico.’ ‘This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the gulf, has little in common with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the Grand Canyon, some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock, Arizona, a dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway intersects the California border. ‘Then he left the highway and started walking south through the desert, following the river-bank. I also really enjoyed the language the author used in the passage, he got straight into it, no fancy words, just directly into the plot. This passage impressed me by how much it makes me want to figure out why a very successful teenager would just throw away his life and disappear.īut this passage was meant to explain what the plot is and what the author has in store for the readers.
Off the bat, I could tell that this was going to be a mystery kind of book, and im looking forward to it. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.’ This passage stuck out to me because it’s supposed to be the hook, and it presents the possibility of reading an interesting story. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.’ ‘I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’s starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and had been an elite athlete.’ ‘Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight.
His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless.
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. Marcus Aurelius Flores Period-5 AP English Summer Reading 2019 Into the Wild () ‘In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt.
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