Angela White: Outside Reading 1: Into the Wild

My favorite book of all time is Into the Wild. I'm sure many of you have read it, but it tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a college graduate, who donates all of his savings to charity and embarks on a journey to the wilderness of Alaska. I used to look up to Chris McCandless as a hero of mine. I admired his ability to change his name and abandon his life and do what he saw necessary to find himself away from the society that he saw as corrupt. I was about 14 years old when I discovered this book, so naturally I was at a time in my life when I thought society was corrupt as well. As I grew older and kept reading the book over and over, I realized that what he did was kind of selfish. I understand that he needed to find himself and get away for a while, but he literally abandoned everyone and everything that he knew with hardly a goodbye. He left his parents and his sister completely hard broken, as they had no idea where he was. He simply disappeared. When I was younger, I totally related to this, in that I wanted to abandon everything as well. Though I still would love to do what he did in a sense of living off the land, and breaking away from civilization (though I know I am far too dependent on technology), I feel like there are so many things he could have done better. If I were in his place, I probably would have at least left a note.