Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 95

High and Low in the Himalayas:
Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air
An outstanding example of contemporary popular writing, Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account o f the Mt. Everest Disaster is a best-selling story
of a high-altitude disaster experienced by the author during a climbing expedition
in 1996. It describes an ascent of the peak, the deaths of five climbers, and the
climb’s aftermath, and explores the nature of such high-altitude expeditions, of the
participants in such ascents, and of the problems of memory associated with trau
matic experience. Although the book is regarded as a non-fictional treatment of
climbing, it verges on being a fictional account concerning the preoccupations and
concerns of our contemporary popular culture — to say simply that Krakauer’s
story has become popular because, like classical fiction, it is a good, though a nonfictional, story, leaves important questions begging. In this article, the conven
tional boundaries between fictional and non-fictional accounts will be set aside as
the social implications of Krakauer’s narrative is considered, for, arguably, all nar
rative is given to certain structures demanded of storytelling and figurative repre
sentations. In this case, furthermore, memory itself, the basis for all claims to
accurate non-fictional narrative, is in doubt. As Krakauer said in an interview pub
lished in a 1997 issue of Outside Magazine, of which he is a contributing editor.
The unreliability of memory among Everest survivors, clients and
guides alike, is something that I find strange and fascinating and
quite disturbing. While comparing multiple interviews that vari
ous subjects gave to me and other journalists, I discovered that the
recollections of some of us have changed dramatically with the
passage of time. Consciously or unconsciously, a number of people
have revised or embellished the details of their stories in signifi
cant and occasionally preposterous ways. And, big surprise, the
revisions invariably put the subject in a better light. Maybe this
has something to do with the fact that the kind of person who goes
to Everest, the big ego and big personality, isn’t inclined to selfcriticism or self-analysis.
Let’s not mince words: Everest doesn’t attract a whole
lot of well-balanced folks.
In his swift transition between these paragraphs, Krakauer joins his com
ments on the problems of memory with earnest criticism of certain psychological