for we have no news of Christopher McCandless being a writer himself . All his journals , diaries and notes prior to his walk into the wild are only available through Krakauer , who administers them very sparingly in his biography , and although Back to the Wild is publicized as containing “ pictures ” and “ writings ” from Christopher McCandless , all it offers , besides the transcription of a few postcards , are captions written by his father and sprinkled with quotes from other authors . If we are to judge by the few released paragraphs of the adventures of Alexander Supertramp written by himself in the third person as they appear in Into the Wild , there is no doubt that Christopher McCandless had quite a way to go before considering himself a writer ; the meager output from his Alaskan adventure may even suggest that he was already losing interest . As to Carine McCandless being a writer herself , opinions might be divided , for a simple memoir might not be enough to claim literary status , and naturally , the question remains whereas The Wild Truth would even have been published at all if her brother ’ s misadventure had not been previously successfully fictionalized , both in writing and on the screen .
That his family would be so hard at work to preserve the memory of Christopher McCandless is not the least ironic aspect of the entire affair : if nothing else , the story of Chris McCandless is that of a rebellion against a familiar environment and it is now precisely those against whom he rebelled in the first place who are the most interested in remembering his rebellion .
This might simply be because McCandless ’ rebellion was never much more than just the spectacle of a rebellion .
The Business of McCandless
Krakauer ’ s book has been adopted in many high-schools as required reading and the Internet is flooded with papers and essays from students and admirers , most of which have in common a deep emotional involvement with the subject and a lack of substance in their development , for , so far , no one has been able to clearly explain the significance of Christopher McCandless ’ legacy . Nonetheless , this has not prevented hundreds of fans from undertaking the perilous trek to the bus over the years , many of them becoming stranded along the way , often while attempting to cross the Teklanika , the very same river that stranded Christopher McCandless . Although the exact number of casualties directly related to the McCandless phenomenon remains unknown , the case of Claire Ackerman , a 29-year-old Swiss woman who drowned in the Teklanika on her way to the bus with her boyfriend in 2010 , is most likely not an isolated incident : in 2013 alone , a dozen people were reported “ lost , hurt or stranded by the rising
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