Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Here you can discuss anything related to Christopher McCandless.
Husky
Posts: 57
Joined: Thu May 19, 2011 6:04 am

Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby Husky » Tue Apr 03, 2012 9:31 pm

Anchorage journalist Craig Medred makes a good case that Chris may have been suffering from a mental illness. This article made me mad at first because I admire Chris for his can-do attitude. But after reading this article several times it began to make a lot of sense regarding why Chris didn't do more to get rescued.

http://www.farnorthscience.com/2007/10/13/media-watch/into-the-wild-the-false-being-within/

Sorry if this article offends anyone. But the Chris story is so prevalent in schools now- I wonder if the mental health aspect is ever discussed?
Here we are in the years
Where the showman shifts the gears
Lives become careers
Children cry in fear
Let us out of here! Neal Young

Don't let fear stand in the way.
There's nothing to it
but to do it! Husky

pezar
Posts: 153
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 3:41 pm

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby pezar » Wed Apr 04, 2012 10:28 pm

I see we got another user in here (Husky) who thinks Chris was insane. The problem with that theory is, the psychiatrists define "insane", and they tend to define every desire outside the desired outcome for the sheep as "insane", and then medicate the "insane person" with drugs so that they will be a compliant zombie. In the USSR, the state was defined as a "paradise", and dissidents were called "insane" because after all if you hated "paradise" then you MUST be insane, then they locked up the dissidents and fried their brains with crude electroshock therapy.

So here we are in 21st century America, and the psychiatrists are on the march again, and if you disagree with empty materialism you're "insane", and insane people need drugs, so if you want something outside the empty materialistic paradigm you are medicated into compliance, and we have millions of kids who can't tolerate "school" going around as zombies.

You have "ADHD" or "schizophrenia" or "autism" if you can't tolerate society, and you need "chemical restraints" so that the system can force you to sit in your seat and learn how to read a story about a guy who broke the bonds of "normal" as a modernistic morality play instead of what it is. After all, we can't have "autistics" and "schizoids" wandering around giving people the idea that society is profoundly broken! Heavens no, the sheep might actually DO SOMETHING to impact the income statements of their overlords! We might even have a revolution! No, we need more drugs! Half of America takes psychiatric medication, but we need more. The sheep are getting restless! MORE DRUGS NOW! :roll: :lol:

What is really happening here is that, well, people are starting to get fed up with debt slavery, and the notion that a person has "no choice" except a life of indentured servitude. The sheep can see the cliff ahead, and even sheep don't like the idea of "sudden deceleration" because even a sheep knows that it hurts. Even pumping the sheep full of pain pills doesn't mean that the end of the fall won't hurt. Don't be a sheep. Those who fall victim to "sudden deceleration" from a very high place tend not to live to tell the tale.

Husky
Posts: 57
Joined: Thu May 19, 2011 6:04 am

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby Husky » Thu Apr 05, 2012 6:17 am

I don't know that much about mental illness to say that Chris was insane. But it does seem like he could have done more to get rescued. He was obviously a very intelligent guy who excelled in school and in athletics but had a lot of family problems. Sure he was looking for a different path in life than the usual mundane existence and he found an exciting adventure which in the end killed him.

The article I linked to theorizes that he had a sort of split personality which may have prevented him from seeking help. He didn't need drugs as far as I can tell. He just needed to feed himself. Did he consciously and intentionally starve to death rather than be a sheep?
Here we are in the years
Where the showman shifts the gears
Lives become careers
Children cry in fear
Let us out of here! Neal Young

Don't let fear stand in the way.
There's nothing to it
but to do it! Husky

GoNorth
Posts: 259
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 3:47 pm

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby GoNorth » Wed Apr 11, 2012 2:18 pm

Thanks a lot for the link, it's a very interesting article. However there are some points I don't agree with, such as:

1. the definition of illness or schizophrenia: I fully agree with what pezar wrote. (and there is also a nice comment by some "drwhitelight" under the article itself).

2. "..that Krakauer tried to rationalize the irrational behavior of Supertramp by blaming it on an overbearing and hypocritical father." Here the author imputes an intention to Krakauer (trying to rationalize... by blaming...), which is pure speculation and does not really match various statements of other people besides Krakauer, such as Carine.

3. The fact that he didn't write complete sentences during his stay at the bus and on the Stampede trail was obviously due to the lack of paper and everyone who has carefully read the book knows that Chris put everything he wrote in more than 100 days on 1 single page of a book. Therefore it's simply ridiculous to speculate that the writing style might say anything about who of these 2 persons - Chris or Alex - was writing which notes (also remember that ALEX wrote full sentences in the journal he left with Wayne).

Edit: Regarding point 1 I strongly recommend the book "The Insanity of Normality" by Arno Gruen (http://www.arnogruen.net). I read it twice about 15 years ago and should probably re-read it myself.

Husky
Posts: 57
Joined: Thu May 19, 2011 6:04 am

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby Husky » Fri Apr 13, 2012 6:05 pm

I wonder why Chris didn't plan to write more during his trip out the Stampede. This was going to be his greatest adventure. He had written journals before about his trips. Why didn't he take a notebook to write in?

He did take (or find) a bunch of books at the bus. He wrote short entries on a blank page in one of those books. All those other paperback books would have had blank pages in them that he could have written on. When he realized that he needed help he found some paper to write his SOS note on. So there was some paper around.

It's not like he didn't have enough time to write. It was light all night so he probably had time to read every book he had with him. Why not write about his daily activities?

And why not do more to get rescued? It just doesn't seem rational to not do more than just put a note on the bus. I wonder if he was expecting hunters to come sooner. There was graffiti written on the bus walls then from hunters including dates in mid-August from when caribou hunting was still legal out there.
Here we are in the years
Where the showman shifts the gears
Lives become careers
Children cry in fear
Let us out of here! Neal Young

Don't let fear stand in the way.
There's nothing to it
but to do it! Husky

GoNorth
Posts: 259
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 3:47 pm

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby GoNorth » Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:05 am

Husky wrote:I wonder why Chris didn't plan to write more during his trip out the Stampede. This was going to be his greatest adventure. He had written journals before about his trips. Why didn't he take a notebook to write in?


That's an interesting question indeed.

Krakauer wrote: "Having neglected to pack writing paper, he began a laconic journal on some blank pages in the back of Tanaina Plantlore." Well, "neglected", does that mean he forgot?

Anyway, you're right that there were more empty pages to fill available in the bus.
Maybe he thouht he might stay (and survive) longer and was just trying to save paper by keeping his notes as short as possible?
Honestly, I have no idea.

Anewanddifferentsun
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2011 4:57 am

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby Anewanddifferentsun » Thu Apr 26, 2012 8:24 am

I do believe Chris was trying to tell a story, but Husky may not be all that far off in citing this article. Several of Krakauer's sources allude to things that suggest Chris was struggling with some kind of mental illness (Charlie in Bullhead City mentions Chris "didn't like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes... had'em bad." Ron Franz/Russ Fritz mentioned Chris's sudden psychological shifts, as did Wayne Westerberg and a high school friend, who saw Chris at a party after his sophomore year at Emory. "It was obvious he had changed. He seemed introverted, almost cold." If he had a mental illness, it would be understandable, particularly if it was some kind of schizophrenia, which has environmental factors. In Chris's case, his abusive upbringing, which included both verbal and physical abuse in addition to resentment from the disclosure of his bastard birth, might have been enough to push him over the edge. Yes, it's true that many children experience as much if not worse than what Chris did, but what if he already had a predisposition for such a thing?
I have no doubt there were complexities the book did not go into, particularly the abuse, which Krakauer was asked to not divulge. Penn's movie gave more insight (more than the parents wanted, however) into domestic violence, but it hardly provided enough to explain what pushed Chris to abandon his family, even the sister he said he loved, an abandonment that suggests something was seriously amiss with his mental state.
I don't believe discussion of the possibility of mental illness diminishes the story in any way. The film itself in many scenes suggests its presence, although it, as a dramatization, cannot be considered documentation in any way. Krakauer's book certainly offers evidence of it, however.

Anewanddifferentsun
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2011 4:57 am

Re: Did Alex Supertramp kill Chris?

Postby Anewanddifferentsun » Thu Apr 26, 2012 11:23 pm

Husky wrote:I wonder why Chris didn't plan to write more during his trip out the Stampede. This was going to be his greatest adventure. He had written journals before about his trips. Why didn't he take a notebook to write in?

He did take (or find) a bunch of books at the bus. He wrote short entries on a blank page in one of those books. All those other paperback books would have had blank pages in them that he could have written on. When he realized that he needed help he found some paper to write his SOS note on. So there was some paper around.

It's not like he didn't have enough time to write. It was light all night so he probably had time to read every book he had with him. Why not write about his daily activities?

And why not do more to get rescued? It just doesn't seem rational to not do more than just put a note on the bus. I wonder if he was expecting hunters to come sooner. There was graffiti written on the bus walls then from hunters including dates in mid-August from when caribou hunting was still legal out there.



I think a key factor is the amount of time he had to commit to finding food. The terse accounts of each day focus on food, so this strongly indicates that life in the wild changes how one spends his/her time. It is clear he read books (the journal refers to some of them) and that he highlighted and wrote in the margins, but there is no writing beyond that and what he scrawled inside the bus, either on its interior or on pieces of wood (the "no pool, no pets, no cigarettes" being the best known). Unlike many of Chris' other travels, in which he'd encounter people who'd help him out (Jan and Bob, Russ Fritz/Ron Franz, the couple in the Grand Canyon who, contrary to the film, he met AFTER going to the Sea of Cortez), the only other time he was truly on his own for a long period of time was the trip down the Colorado River to Mexico. His journal includes an observation that he had lost an estimated 25 pounds on that trip. This extreme weight loss reoccurs in Alaska for obvious reasons: the meat he's eating is very lean, and he's expending a lot of energy/calories to get it. Other than the late entry in his Alaska "journal" that he's starving, there are no declarations thanking God he is alive, that is "spirit is soaring." Starvation takes its toll both physically and mentally. The writing itself reveals stress, in my view, not just in spelling and grammatical errors uncharacteristic of a well educated young man who had a lot of writing experience but also in the disclosures that his weakened condition was "fault of pot(ato) seeds" and that he'd suffered some kind of injury (the SOS note). His mind appeared to be wildly grasping for explanations (or excuses?) for his predicament, which he more or less brought upon himself. Keep in mind that he continued to hunt game and take photographs after the so-called seed poisoning incident. And keep in mind the photo showing how thin he was when he decided to leave the bus in early July. I speculate that he knew he was on the edge at that point. I believe that's why he tried to leave, just as a malnourished Alex left Mexico. As I point out above, he wrote about his weakened physical condition following the Mexico trip. He more than wrote about it in Alaska: he took pictures of himself, three of which have been seen by someone outside the family and the Alaska State Troopers. My understanding is they are difficult to look at, but Chris was documenting his last days.


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