Into the wild is a book about an extremely ideological person. Chris McCandless resents the world of materialism from which he was born into and in an effort to separate himself from this life he walks away from it. The mystery is why McCandless did what he did. He had no reason behind the unsatisfactory family life that many of most modern families have, to run away. In most other cases people stay and deal with their problems. McCandless on the other hand ran away in the most dangerous of possible ways, by totally abandoning his sheltered existence into one that had no safety nets."Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate Freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road."( page 163)
             McCandless looks at the example of books such as "call of the wild", "War and peace," and people such as Thoreau for the bases of his ideology that led to his abandonment. What McCandless fails to see from these examples is the fact that they, unlike him have a safety net. In the books that he looks at, the writers do not live the way that they write. They gathered information from books and slight experiences, mixed this up with a moral that they wanted people to see, and then wrote about it in a way that suggests that it had in fact happened or a least could happen. Their safety net was not going through and taking their ideology all the way to living it. When McCandless looked at Thoreau he saw someone who actually did go through with their thoughts on society, yet he too had a safety net. Though Thoreau did not pay taxes and wasn't very materialistic he was still sheltered. He lived in a cabin at the edge of a lake being supported by others. He did not rough it by letting!
             everything else go like McCandless did.
             I feel that what McCandless did was very brave. My sister on the other hand argues with me saying that he was very stupid. Needless to say, we got onto an argument. She beli...