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).

Into the Wild..(1) Jon Krakauer !!

Jon Krakauer was born on April 12, 1954. He is an American writer and mountaineer, well-known for outdoor and mountain-climbing writing. He is also the author of best-selling non-fiction books — Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven,

Into the Wild was published in 1996 and shortly thereafter spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. The book tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family who, after graduating from college, donated all of the money in his bank account to charity, renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp," and began a journey in the American West. In the book, Krakauer draws parallels between his own experiences and motivations and those of McCandless. Into The Wild was adapted into a film, which was released on September 21, 2007. (Wikipedia)

 

in the author's note, Jon Krakauer describes the story of Christopher McCandless and ends it with his mysterious death ,which really disappointed me,. he then mentions his interest in McCandless story and his character in the same time as he says " unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to death in Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession".

He also He compares himself to McCandless to give a little perspective, and describes the reaction many people had to McCandless’s actions and ends his note by announcing he hopes to allow the reader to form their own opinion of McCandless and his actions.

What is Ramadan???

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and the holiest one of the entire year.

The month in which the Qur'an, the Islamic book, was revealed to Angel Gabriel, who later revealed it to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims do not eat or drink anything from dawn until sunset.

there are also special nightly prayers called, Taraweeh prayers. The entire Quran is recited in these prayers in Mosques all around the world.

Here is a short video explains a bit about Ramadan

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In Ramadan, families and friends gather on one meal to break their fast, Muslims around the world donate food  to the Mosques where some people sit together to break their fast.

in Turkey

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in Pakistan

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in Malaysia

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in the US

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after eating and spending sometime together, we usually go to the Mosque to perform Taraweh prayer.

Muslims also love to visit makkah in Rmadan for it's unique spirituality and praying there is the dream of any Muslim.

in Ramadan, the number of prayers in The Holy Mosque in Makkah can reach up to 2 millions in one night.

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This is a short video of Taraweh prayer from The Holy Mosque in Makkah

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At the end of this month, we have a holiday where we celebrate the completion of Ramadan.

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hopefuly I've given a brief idea about this month and for those who fast like me, I say

Ramadan  mubark