Into the Wild (part2)

Krakauer is careful to avoid weighting Into the Wild with an excess of authorial judgment; although he concedes at the outset that his own feelings about McCandless will become obvious, he painstakingly tries not to impose his deeply held convictions on his readers. A notable subtext in this biography is the ways the young man's story and any number of other themes seem to inter illuminate each other for the author. In the introduction to Into the Wild, Krakauer says


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."

A significant theme is the deep and secret alienation that McCandless felt toward his parents. He was intensely angry with them, although his complaints never seem to have been very clear. Bitterness and frustration often build walls between the competing natures of strong willed sons and equally inflexible fathers, and Krakauer's portrait of the elder McCandless as a self-made man with a powerful personality makes this possibility a very reasonable one. However, a persevering positivism such as McCandless possessed might easily have overcome such an obstacle, and Walt McCandless remembers that, regardless of everything, he loved spending time with his son. Krakauer suggests one possible reason that kept reanimating his powerful antipathy may have been his discovery that the end of his father's first marriage and the beginning of the second were messy and fraught with tension and dissembling on all sides. These long ago marital troubles seem to have enraged the son's impeccable and unforgiving sense of morality, and eventually led him to judge and condemn his father forever, using moral standards so unrelentingly severe he would not even apply them to his friends.