Literary+Analysis+Essay

__Finding The Truth About Happiness__  Happiness only truly exists when it can be shared. Without others happiness is just not there, it is an empty shell with no inner being. The novel, Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, pinpoints the truth behind happiness and thoroughly expresses it throughout the novel. The novel is a true story about a man named Chris McCandless, later Alex Supertramp, who for two years in the the early 1990s traveled continental America and later lived in the Alaskan wilderness for four months before his death. To get the theme of happiness is only real when shared with others across to the audience Jon Krakauer uses motifs in the form of McCandless meeting people while tramping, irony in the form of McCandless learning this only before he dies and the author’s own personal experience. While Chris is traveling around America throughout his transcendental journey, he stops at many places, meets many new people, and forges many new close relationships with those people he meets. In one particular case Chris met an old man named Ronald Franz who he grew very close to, eventually almost becoming family through their strong relationship. “Even when he was sleeping, I was happy knowing he was there.” (55) McCandless and Franz became so close that they eventually shared a happiness together that only families share. Franz had no one else in his family, they had all passed away and he was the last in his family and in the latter part of their friendship Franz felt close enough to Chris that he felt if he could adopt him he could carry on Franz’s family’s name. “So I asked Alex (Chris), if I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson.” (55) Wayne Westerburg was another individual that Chris met and worked for on his journey in South Dakota. One night Westerburg invited Chris to his mother’s house for supper. Westerburg’s mother “doesn’t like a lot of my hired help” and “she wasn’t real enthusiastic about meeting Alex, either.” But in the text Wayne describes how, when they met they instantly connected. “And so she finally had him over for supper. They hit it off immediately. The two of ‘em talked nonstop for five hours.” McCandless went around and met many other people and it shows that when he was with those people he seemed to be happier and indeed made them happier in general. The transference of McCandless being happy while the people he met on the road being happy supports that happiness is only real when shared with others is true. The irony of Krakauer's novel is how McCandless discovers the truth about happiness. McCandless took many novels with him out to the Alaskan wilderness to keep him company in dull times. Most of them were transcendental novels that he took much inspiration for the whole journey from. Upon reading his last book on Earth, McCandless discovers the truth of happiness. Krakauer explains how inside the novel, Doctor Zhivago, the first passage said, “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness....And this was the most vexing of all” (189) and then Chris took it upon himself to mark a note on the side of the page, like he did many other times before in other books, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” (189) Chris had an epiphany to the fact that the happiness was only real when shared, that passage gave light to it and made him realize it. Unfortunately, the irony of this was when Chris realized this he was alone in the Alaskan wilderness searching for truth when it was in front of him the whole time in others. “It can be interpreted that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.” (Page 189) As explained by Krakauer, Chris didn’t only have an epiphany about this theme but he was ready to embrace it, he wanted to live through it and change his life back to normal. However, another irony of this is that at the point he realized this, he was too weak to move and was slowly dying. Happiness was in front of Chris the whole time and he just didn’t realize it. Krakauer, like Chris, went on a journey into the wild because he wanted to transcend beyond his average self and do something more. Krakauer gave up his job and bought the necessary supplies and headed out to Alaska as well, however to face a different challenge: Krakauer wanted to climb the Devil’s Thumb. Krakauer was a climber and had been all his life and to him this would have been the biggest accomplishment so he went for it. During his travels he met a girl named Kai who “was cheerful, outgoing, and easy to talk to…I had convinced myself for many months that I didn’t really mind the absence of intimacy in my life, the lack of real human connection, but the pleasure I’d felt in this woman’s company-the ring of her laughter, the innocent touch of a hand on my arm-exposed my self-deceit and left me hollow and aching.” (137) Krakauer explains in this passage he believed once in his life he didn’t need to have any human connection to be happy and he was fine being alone. After meeting Kai he realized he truly was alone and not happy. Krakauer needed to connect to somebody to be happy because he too realized on his own accord that happiness is only real when shared. “Long after she fell asleep, I lay awake in the next room, listening to her peaceful exhalations.” By going through this experience himself, Krakauer understood Chris’s situation better. The truth behind happiness is express thoroughly in Into The Wild through motifs in the form of McCandless meeting people while tramping, irony in the form of McCandless learning this only before he dies, and the author’s own personal experience. While being a book about Chris McCandless’s journey into the wild the important message and theme of happiness only truly being real when shared with others is a very key component to the book’s story and entirety even though it seems like it is not at times. Krakauer’s literary techniques merged with expressing this theme prove successful in creating an entertaining and meaningful novel. Krakauer truly spread a good message using Into The Wild.