Wayne Sheldrake – possible cause of Into The Wild Death

Wayne Sheldrake

THE ELEGANT SOLUTION:
OMISSION AND PARALLEL NARRATIVE IN THE CREATIVE NONFICTION OF JON KRAKAUER’S “INTO THE WILD”
W.K. SHELDRAKE
Copyright©2004 Wayne K. Sheldrake

Preface
I recently became aware of www.christophermccandless.info when a friend e-mailed me a copy of Jon Krakauer’s 2013 New Yorker article, which was, in part, a response to Ron Hamilton’s paper The Silent Fire ODAP and the death of Christopher McCandless posted at the site. I was intrigued to read that Hamilton’s thesis forwarded the theory of Chris’s death as a starvation event, specifically with regard to the updated investigation regarding the wild potato seeds Chris had presumably eaten preceding his death.

My paper, The Elegant Solution, written long before Hamilton’s—2004, as a requirement toward an M.F.A. (Antioch University/Los Angeles), to my knowledge the first academic literary analysis of Into the Wild—concluded that Chris displayed all of the classic symptoms of advanced starvation regardless of the consumption of the seeds. Interestingly, both Ron and I had background in studies on hunger and starvation, though our sources differed. My research was also aided by an early interview of Chemist Ted Clausen, supervisor of the initial analysis of the infamous wild potato seeds.

This paper notes classic suicidal tendencies antedating Chris’s demise in Alaska—allowing for some ambivalence as to whether suicide matters for readers “of a certain mind.” The paper also examines the story-telling technique of Into the Wild, masterfully handled by Krakauer, an accomplished alpinist climber. That mastery, I speculated, included crucial omissions, particularly regarding Chris’s psychological history and specifically likely edits of potentially damning details shedding light on his relationship to his father. This claim is based partly on Krakauer’s admission that he’d become close and loyal to the McCandless family.

I sent an early draft of The Elegant Solution to Krakauer via his agent in 2004, hoping for responses to the questions of an academic reader. The package was returned unopened.

Now, given Hamilton’s insightful leap and hard evidence, it’s tempting to rewrite my thesis—and add to the fictionalized version, The Source of Your Own Daylight: Two Friends of a Certain Mind (Kindle 2014). I’m content, however, to let both stand, as compliments to Hamilton’s paper and his thinking. I hope the elaborations on the effects of starvation and the review of Chris’s symptoms will further strengthen Hamilton’s thesis. I hope Krakauer fans find a worthy contribution to the conversation here.

Due to its expansive length (80+pages), the condensed version here presents the introductory paragraphs of each section and provides a link to a free version of the paper for those interested in a deeper reading. Here is a link to the page where it is located http://www.waynesheldrake.com

Introduction

In the Author’s Note of Into the Wild Jon Krakauer claims: “I have tried–and largely succeeded, I think—to minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McClandless’s story with fragments of my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.” (ii) But a close reading of Krakauer’s bestseller reveals that the “fragments” he speaks of are actually two full chapters—twenty-four pages, close to 20% of the book. The interruptions are devoted to Krakauer’s early climbing epiphany on a precipice of Alaska’s Stikine Ice Cap, but, rather than the intended comparisons, these early “experiences” suggest key contrasts between the author and his young hero, rather than comparison.

Try as he might for objectivity, Krakauer belays himself to a story that Robert Vare of Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism would say “bridges those connections between events that have taken place and imbues them with meaning and emotion.” (Nieman 2) The resulting interpretation of Chris McClandless’s lonely death harkens to what Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, authors of the creative nonfiction text Tell it Slant, have Salman Rushdie describe as “ ‘the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.’ ” (3) With the story in Krakauer’s hands, readers care about what happened to Chris McCandless. It is evident Krakauer developed a deep and caring bias, too.

This is primarily true because of the fictive power of Krakauer’s voice. His authorial voice is never in doubt. Thomas McNamee, of the New York Times Book Review, writes, “The more we learn about him, the more mysterious McCandless becomes, and the more intriguing.” (29) The mystery and intrigue are artfully created from Krakauer’s manipulation of reams of information—interviews, letters, journal entries, on-site forensics, deep research, history, maps, and expert testimony. He writes like a guide lead-climbing an increasingly technical Big Wall. He sets the cams and chocks while showing the jugs, smears and hand jams that solve the easy, early problems for readers in a way that prepares them—saves their energy and builds their repertoire—for a complex climax.

McNamee calls the portrait of McCandless, “so vivid at times that it dazzles, at others so mystifying that one wants to scream.” (29) But, interestingly, among the encyclopedic braiding of all the clues included in Into the Wild, what anchors the tale is one of the most effective choices of imaginative writers: Omission. Let the reader beware: in a narrative that builds upon the ironic blunders of a personality at least partly “characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption,” (Krakauer 120), a deeply wounded (121) soul is discovered to harbor “rage.” This volatile anger is masked in “sullen withdrawal.” (123) But the hero, who had already stumbled close to death at least twice before his final demise, is likeable, and he is forgiven the fault in his own lonely death.

Sympathy for McCandless makes for compelling narrative, but leaving out a psychological profile of the troubled boy, especially at the hands of a gifted researcher like Krakauer, seems a bit calculated. From a journalistic standpoint, to discount the expertise of those who might interpret the young man’s spiritual and emotional agony as recognizable dysfunction, neurosis or psychosis might even be called negligent.

So, why does an author who obviously has considered his own psychological relationship to extreme wilderness adventure skip the “consideration of psychiatric illness” in Chris McCandlesss, who died poorly equipped and psychologically wounded in the wilderness?

Incompetent Risk Junkie?
Before considering Chris’s final dirge, it might be useful to consider why he wasn’t dead long before the Alaska trek. In the years between high school and his departure for the North, Chris had been in jail twice, and threatened at gunpoint by a railroad “bull” (Krakauer, 53). A summer jaunt in the Mojave had been a “brush with disaster.” He returned, his sister said, emaciated, “‘like those paintings of Jesus on the cross.’” (118) On another adventure he nearly died of heat stroke wandering the shores of Lake Mead, saved only by passing boaters. (29) On yet another of his impulsive, self-styled expeditions he was swept to sea in a canoe and barely survived, only to get lost in the Mexican deserts of the Colorado River later the same trip. An incessant blunderer, he broke his only canoe paddle in the storm that almost killed him.(36) There, he was saved again, this time by hunters who happened to be in the area.

Even in when he was not flirting with risky, solo, wilderness vagabondage, he was found on the side of an Oregon road “‘Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.’” (30) Hungry because his latest stunt had been surviving on nothing but the edible plants he could find. Once, in the desert, he drove a compact Datsun two miles off-road until it was hopelessly stuck. The car was then swamped in a flash flood that almost caught him, too. (26) The cogent, adequately fed reader might easily conclude Chris was lucky to get to Alaska, let alone survive there.

Dysfunction
Chris had no Alaskan wilderness experience when he hiked up the Stampede Trail. Normally, a wilderness novice would seek and heeded the vital advice of a wilderness outfitter and/or a successful survivalist—maybe take a trip with an Outward Bound group—before attempting a wildcatting solo adventure. Not Chris. Part of what made his demise maddeningly ironic was that he not only rejected advice he was offered, he embraced the opinions of authors who were pretenders to the wild. With the exception of a book on edible plants, the weight and space his books took up in his backpack was wasted.

Thoreau’s tame year with nature was staged a short foot-commute from Concord. Gogol was a satirist. Tolstoy “despite his famous advocacy of celibacy, had been an enthusiastic sexual adventurer.” (Krakauer 122) Chris’s Alaskan literary hero, Jack London, was in truth “a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.” He spent a few months in Alaska and eventually committed suicide. (44)

From a practical standpoint it would have been better if Chris had packed-in the stories of wilderness fanatics Jon Krakauer used as literary foils: Everett Ruess, desert solitarian; Gene Rosellini, Stone Age recreationalist; John Mallon Waterman, survival-alpinist; Carl McCunn, photographer drop-out; Sir John Franklin, Victorian expeditionary; Edwin Muir tree and cliff-climbing adrenaline junkie. Maybe Chris would have learned by way of deduction some of the mistakes to avoid in the wilderness.

A Little Crazy?
The original article that sparked the writing of Into the Wild drew the largest reader response in the history of Outside magazine. Many Alaskans wrote to express their dismay. “Alex was a nut,” one reader wrote. “McCandless had already gone over the edge and just happened to hit bottom in Alaska.” From perspective of many Alaskans, specifically one Nick Jams of the Inupiat village of Ambler, Chris’s story was a “story of dumbassedness.” (71) Less biased readers emphasized the internal mysteries of the death. Another reader asked: “Why would any son cause his parents and family such permanent and perplexing pain?” (71)

John Krakauer’s response is direct. “McCandless wasn’t mentally ill….And he wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast.” Further “he wasn’t incompetent.” (85) Indeed, one of the keystone writing decisions Krakauer made as author of Chris McClandless’s story was to exclude the possibility that the boy’s demise was in any way related to his psychological vulnerabilities. “Although there may be some truth in [the] hypothesis” that Chris was a mentally wounded young man, Krakauer writes, “…posthumous off-the-rack psychoanalysis is a dubious, highly speculative enterprise that inevitably demeans and trivializes the absent analysand. It’s not clear that much of value is learned by reducing Chris McCandless’s strange spiritual quest to a list of pat psychological disorders.” (184)

Brain Chemistry. Danger. Endorphins. Addiction. Euphoria.
Euphoria.
Hold that thought.

I’d like to think I am being overly dramatic. It would be nice if Chris’s earlier brushes with death were all about the buzz and his Alaska escapade was just bad luck. But if it was bad luck Chris’s predisposition toward death made that luck worse. What friends meant when they said Chris had a screw loose is that he “had a dark side…characterized,” as Krakauer put it, “by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption.” (120) Neither friend nor stranger could talk Chris out of his precarious odyssey.

He left people behind that dearly missed him. He left work he enjoyed. He left a girlfriend. Unequivocally, his trip was more important than his relationships. His farewells revealed the darkest of a dark side: a telling obsession with death. “Providing I get through this Alaska Deal in one piece…” he wrote one friend. To another: “This is the last you shall hear from me, Wayne….If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again….” (3)

Even Krakauer interpolates that Chris was leaving “a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence,” (23) and his interviews with two friends who knew Chris best—his cutting-crew boss Wayne Westerburg, and his desert-rat companion Ron Franz—unearthed the crux of the boy’s angst. “Something wasn’t right between he and his family,” Wayne said.

Starvation: The Hungry North
It’s hard to find comparative adventures to Chris McCandless’s Alaskan Odyssey. Krakauer’s choices are either outright suicides, or men who vanished and died of unknown causes. But we do know what killed Chris. Starvation. A few comparisons might be helpful to determine the likely patterns of his behavior and thoughts in semi-starvation and then under abject starvation.

In 1944 Leon Crane, a test pilot, crashed in Alaska three days before Christmas. He had two packs of matches and a Boy Scout knife to help him survive temperatures that bottomed out at -50 degrees. He had no gloves. He ate nothing but snow for nine days. After that he said “hunger disappeared.” He found a cabin and for a few days rationed himself raisins and cocoa. He tried an escape but returned to the cabin when he realized he was dangerously weak. He found things he had missed in the cabin, more food and a rifle. He stayed in the cabin and hunted until mid-February, then he packed up a supply of food and tried another escape. He got lucky. Two weeks later he found another cabin and people. (Biology 803-804)

Into the Wild makes mention of Sir John Franklin, a Canadian explorer who made three ill-begotten forays in search of the mythical Northwest Passage. He perished along with 128 of his men on the third trip. (Krakauer 180-181) Through the logs of his earlier trips Franklin’s exploits make the highlights of starvation literature.

Fathers and Sons
“How is it…that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?”

The tension that sometimes frustrates fathers as their sons ascend to tendentious independence became trenchant between Walt and Chris McCandless. In the years of his withdrawal, the boy’s personality turned igneous. That the two already had competing personalities was well known. Walt was a “stern” father (122), a controlling, intense person. Krakauer observes, “some very high voltage is crackling through his wires,” and “his moods can be dark and mercurial.” A “famous temper” is reported. “There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came,” Krakauer concludes. (105) The “polarization” between the two filters through. Krakauer balances emotionally charged language to describe both father and son.

Walt is “stubborn,” “high strung,” an undeniable “authority” figure whose “conditional love” Chris saw as “tyranny.” Chris was a “stubborn,” “highstrung,” teenager, obviously of an “immoderate,” “independent nature,” who “brooded,” who “raged” behind his parent’s back that they were “so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful and insulting.” Eventually Chris decided his father had unforgivable “moral shortcomings,” (64) and Chris became “incapable of extending lenity to his father.” (122) Chris went from “mad,” “withdrawn,” “smoldering anger,” (121) to a “choler of self-righteous indignation.” (122)

In most instances we might conclude the kid was just a spoiled brat. But Chris had it a little tougher than that. He had the dirt on his dad.

Suicidal Tendencies
“How is it…that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?”

The brutal psychological answer to Walt McCandless’s question chops at the ragged flesh of Chris’s McClandless’s emotional wounds. Upon the break with his family, he became the BASE-jumper who missed. At the juncture that he declared himself without a family, he seemed to realize that if he was going to have a hero he would have to be his own hero—Alexander Supertramp. If his life—blazoned with a strong, glaringly discordant (if not disordered) personality; mixed with counter-logical (if not dysfunctional) psychology; immersed in transcendental and increasingly nihilistic philosophy; and layer with self-abusive, suicidal tendencies—was to amount to anything, it was up to him.

All the pain and beauty of life was in his hands. He determined he would rise above the irrational, oppressive, disrespectful, insulting, hypocritical lifestyle of his parents, or he would fall. Walt McCandless’s grasp for motive was a reckoning for signs, and the signs that his son would fall are compelling.

Although Krakauer would prefer to discount Chris’s obsession with death as “melodramatic declaration,” there is no doubt the narrative he carefully jig-sawed together alludes to suicide often enough that thoughts of it are never far from an attentive reader’s mind. From a persuasive standpoint, he had to allow “considerable speculation that the boy had been bent on suicide from the beginning, that when Chris walked into the bush, he had no intention of walking out again.”

Krakauer: Climbing Matters
Krakauer says he really enjoys researching. (Capitola) If so, why was a psychological analysis of Chris omitted from Into the Wild? Wouldn’t a psychological profile, or even a bone fide dismissal of the possibilities of suicide requir all the requisite mystery, lead-chasing, academic background, expert testimony, organization, and visualization of a good researcher? It would have. And wouldn’t it have rendered Chris’s story closer to the whole truth? It would have. Was Krakauer sloppy? Did deadlines prevent him from pursuing the psychological leads?

Was the omission simply a matter of logistics, an additional project involving experts, time and study that simply would have made the entire undertaking nearly insurmountable? Maybe. Was the decision editorial? Maybe. In 1996, Krakauer was not the writer of clout he has become, and maybe 207 pages was all an editor could push, and all a publisher would risk. Or maybe Krakauer himself exercised his own editorial economy, doing what any climber seeking the most efficient and well-designed route through a complex problem would do—drop the excess weight, rely on sound protection, and attack the crux.

Or was he too involved and too loyal to the McCandless family to dig further? Maybe.

It is hard to reason for the omission.

Bliss
Brain chemistry. Danger. Endorphins. Addiction. Euphoria.

When William Butler Yeats invited himself along on an arduous climb including “England’s leading climbers,” he was rebuffed. The leader of the group found out his motives were bizarrely mystical, antithesis to the technicalities of the expedition. Yeats was considered “dangerous” and was uninvited. (Bernbaum 146) Those leading climbers, versed in the literal dangers of the climb, knew the added hazard of a mind on a pilgrimage for figurative achievements (those etymological hints Webster gives to feudal and sexual lordliness, power, control, and rights to nature) via willing “exposure to destruction.” (Webster 253)

When Krakauer says, “Maybe this is a problem with people who read too much and don’t discriminate between instructions of the imagination and reality,” (Rose) he refers to anyone who hasn’t weighed out the difference between nature as the subject of literary romantic esthetic (which inflames one’s narcissistic hero worship) against the realities of wilderness survival ascetic (which edifies one’s reverent self-discipline) and learned to manage the intersection of the two in the context of his own abilities. In other words, wilderness literati who want to dance with the wolves might do well to figure out the difference between freelancing semi-suicidal risk-taking and obedient, humble pilgrimage. If they want to get out alive.

Aside from a rational psychological inventory of his own will to survive, what Krakauer discovered on the verglassed precipice of Devil’s Thumb was the discipline required to balance the esthetic with the ascetic in the midst of his abilities.

The Elegant Solution: Omission
More than anything he lacked, Chris lacked the talent for narrative that Jon Krakauer, even in his early twenties, excelled. At Devil’s Thumb, Krakauer was able to consider the adventure from several points of view—including a third person commentary of his pitiable duncehood, his father’s possible perspective. (147) His visualizations entertained the comical and the tragic. Chris McClandless had no such imagination. He had abandoned his family, prejudices entrenched. His journey was a planned dead-end. Chris’s journals read as melodrama because the focus of his writing so myopically pinpointed himself; he was his own, and his only, audience. What he understood least about the narrative he had designed for himself was the author’s prerogative to exercise omission for the sake of the story. The tragedy of Chris McClandless’s authorship was that he omitted what cannot be omitted if a narrative hopes to survive: the end.

By leaving his Alaskan adventure open-ended, precursed always with a cryptic “if,” he left himself vulnerable to the weakest of his weaknesses, and when danger was most dangerous, his disarmed imagination failed him. Creatively indigent, he succumbed.

Krakauer became part of the postvention, part of the grief work, of the McCandless’s loss. The writing of his book helped Chris’s parents come to terms with the bizarre and sad death of their son. When David Mazel said that Into the Wild was “engendered with…technical schemes, route making, passion and metaphor of a life-long mountaineer,” he might have as easily said that Into the Wild mattered to Jon Krakauer.

The story, like so many climbs, is full of calculated risks, and at its riskiest it was a story Krakauer did not want to “fuck up.” (Capitola) Fucking up in this case meant making the lives of those who were already burdened more miserable. Not fucking up, on the practical and the narrative level, meant leaving the most painful possibilities of the story out and focusing on the most noble.

Metaphor: The Elegant Mistake
Practically, one could say, as Miller and Paola point out, “it’s nearly impossible to tell ‘the whole truth’” in any one story. (42) Artistically, I think Krakauer realized what one critic gave him credit for, “that a dismissive off-the-rack psychoanalysis of the impulse to live dangerously in the wild can miss something important. That insight is not only good for the story itself but can encourage readers to confront issues we are inclined to sentimentalize.” (Sisk 52) In her essay “Various Parts of the Elephant: On Metaphor,” Beth Ann Fennely writes that “Anne Carson says metaphor ‘causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.’ But these ‘mistakes’ can lead to enlightenment.” (98)

Krakauer’s use of metaphor comes naturally, from his long experience in alpine climbing. Thus, Into the Wild moves up the mountain of the facts. Chapters are set up like higher and higher protections jammed into the cracks of the argument. Belayed, the reasoning moves on, picking toe holds and jugs and smears that logically climb closer to the summit—or bivouacs to stop and tell other stories that obliquely fit the relevance of the climb, or just to rest. The final assault is a complex, technical wall that depends on everything that has come before, with Krakauer exhaustively speculating the best specific route.

Metaphorically, Into the Wild guides readers like a lead climber, discovering its own mistakes as it recreates Chris’s final, fatal route.

Works Cited
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