A vigorous
debate broke out in the early 1990s over the question of who Chris McCandless was. This debate
helped inspireto expand his popular 1993 Outside Magazine article on
Chris's death into a best-selling book. As readers argued about Chris's death, two factions
emerged: those who thought Chris was an arrogant fool who went into the wilderness unprepared
and deserved to die, and those who understood Chris as a sensitive visionary whose death was an
unfortunate byproduct of following through on his idealsideals that made him deliberately reject
some of the precautions he was condemned for not taking.
Krakauer falls
openly in the latter faction: he writes the book out of his identification with and sympathy for
Chris and his quest. He presents Chris as an idealistic, if angry, young man searching for his
identity. His Chris is a passionate reader of writers like Tolstoy and...
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