Halfway Post!

I am finally halfway through Into the Wild and I'm loving the book so far.  Here are the answers to the questions for Into the Wild so far.

Chapter 1

1.     1. McCandless grew up in a suburb of Washington D.C.  He graduated from Emory University with honors. (Authors note)

2.   2.  The themes introduced are “the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high- risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, and the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons” (Authors note). 

    3.The quote is Christopher’s letter to someone named Wayne explaining where Christopher is going.  He is excited about what is to come.  It is basically his final goodbye.  (pg. 3)

4.    4.Alex is Christopher McCandless.  (pg. 4)

5.    5. Jim Gallien is a union electrician who met McCandless on the way to Anchorage.  Christopher needed a ride to the edge of Denali National Park.  (pg. 4)

6.     6. Gallien thought he was “congenial and well educated” (pg. 5).  He also thought that Chris wouldn’t have a chance to survive with the supplies he had. (pg. 5)

7.    7. Gallien tried to convince McCandless not to go into the woods alone unless he went and got the right materials.  He offered to drive him to Anchorage and buy him some decent gear then drive him back.(pg. 6)

8.     8. McCandless’s said that he would be fine with what he had.  Gallien gave McCandless his boots. (pgs. 6-7)

9.     9. He figured McCandless would be ok.  He thought Christopher would just get hungry and walk out to the highway. (pg. 7)

     10. Gallien’s statement that McCandless would “probably get hungry pretty quick and just walk out to the highway.  That’s what any normal person would do,” is an example of the literary device of irony of situation.  What is ironic about the statement?  Gallien just assumed that McCandless would leave the woods because he would get hungry.  Just the opposite happened because McCandless starved to death in the woods.  Chris is far from normal. (pg. 7)

     Chapter 2

     11. This was carved into a piece of wood discovered at the sight of Christopher’s death.  It gives the reader a picture of where Chris was living.  “It was the Wild, the savage, the frozen- hearted Northland Wild” (pg.9).

12. This is used to describe the type of terrain McCandless was walking through. (pg. 10)

13. He starved to death. (pg. 14)

Chapter 3

14. He owns a grain elevator Carthage.  He becomes close friends with Chris, and Chris sends him letters after he leaves.  (pg. 16-17)

15.  Local color is introduced when a writer uses regional or colorful terms to present an image of a distinct area or culture. Rubber tramps are bad people who own cars.  Leather tramps bad people that don’t own a car and have to hitchhike everywhere. (pg. 17)

16. Chris found a temporary family in Carthage. (pg. 18)

17. He wanted to continue his “nomadic existence” (pg. 19)

18.  They know War and Peace was important because Chris took one of the names and made it his own. (pg. 19)

19.  “McCandless had been raised in the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Annandale, Virginia” (pg. 19).  His father is an aerospace engineer.  There were eight children in the family; six of them were from his father’s first marriage.  Chris was especially close to his younger sister Carine. (pg20)

20.  He donated all of his money to OXFAM, which is a charity designed to help fight hunger. (pg. 20)

21.  “Chris had lived off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates, and a table.  He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barracks.  And he didn’t have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him.”(pg. 22)  Chris was preparing himself by living on his own with no one to talk to.

Chapter 4 and 5

22.  Chris didn’t need to escape.  He found out more about himself. (pg25)

23. She is a rubber tramp who is traveling around the west selling knick- knacks.  She saw Chris when he was looking for berries to eat so she asked if she could give him a ride anywhere. (pg. 30)

24.  He traveled down the Colorado River to the Gulf of Carolina.  He then paddled through Yuma and through the Mexican border.  He then became lost many times in the swamps while trying to find his way back out to sea. (pg. 34)

25.  He talks in third person, and he likes to talk about what has happened to him, and how he feels during that day. (pg. 34)

26.  “It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.  God it’s great to be alive!” (pg.37)  Chris learns a lot that living your life to the fullest is the greatest adventure. (pg. 37)

27.  He worked at McDonald’s and lived in a trailer with a man named Charlie.  He decided to leave and meet up with Jan and Bob again. (pg. 39-41)

28.  “Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving a grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert.  The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society” (pg. 43).

29.  He was always willing to help.  He loved all the classic books.  He had a good time when he was around people.  He was playful and had a way with animals.  Chris didn’t like to talk about his family. (pg.43-45)

30.  She thought he would be fine.  “I felt sure he’d figure out Alaska, too.” (pg.46)

Chapter 6 and 7

31.  He was an eighty year old man who crossed paths with Chris in 1992.  He gave Chris a ride from Salton City to the camp where Chris was staying. (pg. 48)

32.  It is a desert state park where Chris set up camp. (pg. 48)

33.  While he was overseas, his wife and only child were killed by a drunk driver. (pg. 50)

34.  His paternal impulses were renewed.  He asked Chris if he would be his adopted grandson. (pg. 50 and 55)

35.  McCandless made a tooled leather belt.  It is one of the most astonishing things Chris left behind. (pg. 51-52)

36.  “McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well- relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it” (pg. 55).  Chris was able to slip out of peoples’ lives without feeling too bad about it, no matter how much he affected the people he left. (pg. 55)

37.  He advises Franz to go out and enjoy the wild.  “Astoundingly, the eighty-one-year-old man took the brash twenty-four-year-old vagabond’s advice to heart” (pg. 58). He packed up and moved to Chris’s old site. (pg. 58)

38.  Franz picked up two hitchhikers and he started to tell them about Alex when they told him that they had read Chris’s story in Outdoor magazine. (pg. 60)

39. They had been working to many long days, and Wayne was expecting Chris to be back to help out. (pg. 62)

40.  “Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung” (pg. 64).  “He said they were pretty close.  Said she was beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would turn their heads and stare” (pg. 63).  He often wrote her letters complaining about their parents. (pg. 63-64)

Chapter 8 and 9

41.  The purpose is to show the parallels between Rossellini and McCandless. “McCandless was a seeker and had an impractical fascination with the harsh side of nature.” (pg. 85)

42.  I think that Krakauer saw a likeliness between himself and Waterman also because they were both climbers and both had some of the people they climbed with who died. (pg. 77)

43.  McCunn was used to show the things that he had in common with Chris, and the ways him and Chris were different.  “Like Waterman and McCunn, he displayed a staggering paucity of common sense.  And unlike McCunn, he didn’t go into the bush assuming that someone would automatically appear to save his bacon before he came to grief.” (pg. 85)

44.  Everett Ruess was born in Oakland, California in 1914.  Ruess attended the Otis Art School and Hollywood High.  When he was sixteen, he took his first journey, hitchhiking through Yosemite and Big Sur.  He returned home long enough to get his high school diploma then he left to travel again.  “The beauty of this country is becoming part of me.  I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler… I have some good friends here, but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do” (pg. 91).  Ruess adopts multiple names as his own.  His parents became worried about him, so they sent out a search team to try and find him.  They quickly found his two burros but they couldn’t find him.  People think that Ruess either fell off a cliff, drowned, was murdered by cattle rustlers, or he had run off to join an Indian tribe. (pg. 89-95)

45.  “Everett was strange, kind of different.  But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream.  That’s what was great about them.  They tried.  Not many do.”