My Response to Sam's Question!!

talbot_sam said...

Good work Ameerah! You have told us about two important influences upon McCandless. Can you see why McCandless felt an affinity with Tolstoy? Or why he adheared to Tolstoyean values.

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Thank you Sam..

Regarding your question, yes I do believe that McCandless is really influenced by Tolstoy and he admired the author's values and ethics and tried a lot to imitate his way of living, and some other authors,. A good example for that would be getting rid of all of his money and living the freedom life without being tied to materialism boundaries.

Tolstoy tried to do the same thing but he was stopped from doing so by his wife who admired to be a wealthy woman living a fancy life.

Tolstoy was uncomfortable with his life, so he went on an Odyssey and died there. The same thing has happened to McCandless.

I think they have got many common beliefs and attitudes and have had nearly similar way of living

Into the Wild...McCandless’ Literary Influences???

It is known that McCandless was influenced by some f the famous writers and there were many quotes found with his remain or he had written them in some of his letters.

What influence did those writers had on him and what are the reasons beyond that???

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1- Leo Tolstoy and Realism.

He was a Russian author, essayist and moral philosopher wrote the epic novel War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1873 to 1877 ) .

Realism broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life(A Handbook to Literature 428).

Leo Tolstoy ranks as one of the world's great writers, and his War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written.It was also the peak of Tolstoy's personal life.

He wanted to give his wealth away, but his wife would not hear of it. An unhappy compromise was reached in 1884, when Tolstoy assigned to his wife the copyright to all his works before 1881.

Unable to deal with the family quarrels, in 1910 he set out on his last pilgrimage accompanied by his youngest daughter and his doctor.

The trip proved too much, and he died in Astapovo, Russia, on November 9, 1910.

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2- Jack London and Naturalism..

 

He was an American author, journalist, and social activist and his novel "The Call of the Wild" believed to have been the biggest impact on McCandless.

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings(http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm).

In London’s adolescent, he worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, served on a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly's Army of unemployed working men, hoboed around the country, and returned to attend high school at age 19

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3- Thoreau and Transcendentalism..

He was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. It is sometimes called American transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental(Wikipedia).

He spent his life in his home community, whose flora and fauna he explored with a microscopic eye, recording his observations

Early interpreters of Thoreau thought of him as a naturalist, due to his observations of botanical phenomena and the amount of time roaming the environs of Concord with spyglass, notebook, and pencil, recording the seasonal changes and life cycles of hundreds of plants.

He wrote disparagingly of the destruction of the natural environment, of which human beings were an integral part.

He deplored the implications of the rise of industrialism, with its emphasis upon materialistic values.

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Into the Wild..McCandless's use of the third person!!!!

Writers may apply different styles in their writings, so it’s not possible to have only one way of writing. However, what if you’re writing diaries?? what if your documenting your adventures??

Would you write it in the normal first person way or would you do as our hero has done when he wrote letters, talking about himself, using the third person form.

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Is it a usual style to be used??? Or a thing that is associated with his odd character?? i.e. he refused to live a typical life that most guys of his age would lived but took the advantage of being different than anyone else wither he meant to do so or not.

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I’ve read many analysis articles about him and I can summaries his usage to the third person to one of two reasons:

Firstly, and this is what might most people agree to is that’s a famous way of writing memoirs.

It’s simply a creative way of talking about your own experience especially if someone else might eyes your letters, as happened with McCandless.

It might provide more life to the piece of writing and helps expressing different types of feelings such as describing unpleasant events that happened to you which avoid any embarrassment.

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Secondly, which I mostly agree to is that he has an onset of schizophrenia because his letters while canoeing are not nearly as poetic.

They are full with scare, loss of identity. He seems most confused and sick but this illness doesn’t diminish his talent and his heart.

Female Adventurer.. (3)

.."Alexandra David-Néel"..

Alexandra was Born in Paris, Saint-Mandé, on October 24, 1868. she was a Belgian-French explorer, anarchist, spiritualist, Buddhist and writer, most known for her visit to Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was forbidden to foreigners(wikipedia).

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Alexandrine Marie David was the only daughter of a French father of Huguenot ancestry and a Catholic mother of Scandinavian origin.

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Very early she displayed her most characteristic personality traits, in sharp contrast with her severe, austere, bourgeois parental environment. She was a proud, fiercely individualistic child, yearning for freedom.

She ran away from home several times to flee this dour loveless home, attracted by travels to faraway initiatory lands, to satisfy the need for escape she felt to the end of her life.

At the age of 18, she had already visited England, Switzerland and Spain on her own(wikipedia).

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She traveled to India, Sikkim, Japan many times but she is more famous for her unique experiences as a foreigner living in Tibet for an extended period of time.

In the period 1914 - '16 she lived in a cave in Sikkim, near the Tibetan border, learning spirituality, together with the Tibetan monk Aphur Yongden, who became her lifelong travelling companion, and whom she would later adopt (Alexandra David-Néel.org).

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At age 54, David-Néel was the first European woman to venture into Tibet's capital, Lhasa. Disguising herself as a pilgrim, she journeyed into Tibet's 'forbidden city' in 1932. She died in Digne, France, in 1969 at the age of 101, and a museum is kept there in her honour.

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She wrote several books...

1- My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City..

2- Magic and Mystery in Tibet...

3- Immortality and Reincarnation: Wisdom from the Forbidden Journey..

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Female Adventurer.. (2)

.."Freya Stark"..

Dame Freya Madeline Stark, born 31 January 1893, Paris, France and she was a British travel writer.

In her lifetime she was famous for her experiences in the Middle East, her writing and her cartography. Freya Stark was not only one of the first Western women to travel through the Arabian deserts (Hadhramaut), she often travelled solo into areas where few Europeans, let alone women, had ever been.

She wrote more than two dozen books based on her travels...

                          

1- A Winter in Arabia: A Journey through Yemen

In 1934 Freya Stark made her first journey to the Hadhramaut in what is now Yemen—the first woman to do so alone. Even though that journey ended in disappointment, sickness, and a forced rescue, Stark, undeterred, returned to Yemen two years later. Starting in Mukalla and skirting the fringes of the legendary and unexplored Empty Quarter, she spent the winter searching for Shabwa—ancient capital of the Hadhramaut and a holy grail for generations of explorers. From within Stark’s beautifully-crafted and deeply knowledgeable narrative emerges a rare portrait of the customs and cultures of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. A Winter in Arabia is one of the most important pieces of literature on the region and a book that placed Freya Stark in the pantheon of great writers and explorers of the Arab World.

2- The Minaret of Djam: An Excursion in Afghanistan..

Freya Stark traveled the difficult and often dangerous journey from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat in search of one of Afghanistan’s most celebrated treasures, the Minaret of Djam. This magnificent symbol of the powerful Ghorid Empire that once stretched from Iran to India lies in the heart of central Afghanistan’s wild Ghor Province. Surrounded by over 6,000 foot high mountains and by the remains of what many believe to have been the lost city of Turquoise Mountain—one of the greatest cities of the Middle Ages—Djam is, even today, one of the most inaccessible and remote places in Afghanistan. When Freya Stark traveled there, few people in the world had ever laid eyes on it or managed to reach the desolate valley in which it lies.

3- The southern gates of Arabia: a journey in the Hadhramaut..

In 1934, Freya Stark determined that she would follow the ancient frankincense routes through the fertile Hadhramaut valley to locate and record what was left of the legendary lost city of Shabwa. In 1936 she published _The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut_ which, as did many of her thirty-odd books, became a best seller.

A biography written by Jane Fletcher and it deals with Freya Stark, who became an expert Arabist before and during World War II. She was an intrepid traveller, often travelling in remote areas by donkey and relying on the kindness of locals to lodge her. She was a member of the Royal Geographical Society and contributed to accurate mapping of the middle east.

Female Adventurer... (1)

.                                                  .."Dervla Murphy"..

Dervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. At teenage, she used to nurse her mother and she did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. After her mother's death, she was free to complete her adventures.

Some of her famous books:

1- FULL TILT: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India.


A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantites, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.(DervlaMurphy.com )

2- THE WAITING LAND: A Spell in Nepal

In The Waiting Land seasoned travel writer Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal’s different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country’s natural grandeur and beauty. With her special brand of Irish understatement, she delights in the unpredictability of her journey and in the surprises which make her travels in that unique country such a stirring experience. Having settled in a village in the Pokhara Valley to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, she makes her home in a tiny, vermin-infested room over a stall in the bazaar. In diary form, she describes her various journeys by air, by bicycle and on foot into the remote and mountainous Lantang region on the border of Tibet. Murphy’s charm and sensitivity as a writer and traveller reveal not only the vitality of an age-old civilization facing the challenge of Westernisation, but the wonder and excitement of her own remarkable adventures.(goodreads.com)

3- A PLACE APART

A Place Apart is a quite remarkable geographical and psychological travelogue that rises phoenix-like above history, politics, theology and economics.


It is an extraordinarily successful attempt to present Northern Ireland from the inside out, with honesty, sympathy and understand.( TLS)

4- TIBETAN FOOTHOLD

In July 1963 Dervla Murphy arrived in a sweltering Delhi by bicycle. Deciding that the heat precluded further cycling until November, she worked in Tibetan refugee camps in Northern India. Using extracts from the diaries she kept at the time, Dervla describes the day-to-day life in the camps where hundreds of children are living in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources. Quickly falling in love with the "Tiblets" - cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children - she pitches in with a helping hand wherever it is needed (just about everywhere), and even finds time to meet the Dalai Lama and his entourage (amazon.com)

Into the Wild..(2) Christopher McCandless

Christopher McCandless is the protagonist of the story. He is quite an interesting character to be analyzed due to his irrational and insane behavior, as some people might consider.

Chris McCandless or as he calls himself "Alexander Supertramp" created a new life for himself by abandoning his family and upbringing and taking to the road for a nomadic existence.

The world have been very materialistic and people tend to focus more on themselves rather than the trillions of others in our world.

Christopher McCandless wanted to get away from today’s ways and he “no longer [wanted to] be poisoned by civilization” (Krakauer, 163) or be “unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstracting and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.” (Krakauer, 22).

He doesn't like the normal life of fame and wealth as he says "Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth." and that's why he's been described as an authentic person.

His life was about "taking risks, experiencing nature and discovering ultimate freedom."

He hiked into the Alaskan wilderness with little food and equipment, hoping to live a period of solitude and almost four months later, weighing only 67 pounds (30 kg), he died of starvation near Denali National Park and Preserve.

His death was a real shock to those who met him in his extreme odyssey and newspapers published his sad story to the readers who were divided in their opinions. Some of them believed Christopher McCandless to be irresponsible. Yet to some, he was just a brilliant young man who went out to find himself.

However, the author Krakauer, who tracked his story for a long time, thinks that “McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul” (Krakauer, 183).