Libro Into The Wild (Inglès) Para El Colegio

Jon
Krakauer

INTO THE

WILD

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For Linda

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AUTHOR’SNOTE

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast familyhitchhiked to Alaska
and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his
decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor ofOutside
magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy's death. His name turned out
to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He'd grown up, I learned, in anaffluent suburb
of Washington, D.C., where he'd excelled academically and had been an elite athlete.
Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of
1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of
a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of
his possessions, burned all the cash inhis wallet. And then he invented a new life for
himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North
America in search of raw, transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was
or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.
Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran in the
January 1993 issue ofthe magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long
after that issue ofOutside was replaced on the newsstands by more current journalistic
fare. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling
parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go,
I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led tohis death in the Alaska
taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on
obsession. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other,
larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure
high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly
charged bond that existsbetween fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry
is the book now before you.
I won't claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless's strange tale struck a
personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through

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most of thebook, I have tried—and largely succeeded, I think—to minimize my authorial
presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless's story with fragments of a
narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw
some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.
He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism
thatdid not mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by the writing of Leo
Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the great novelist had forsaken a life of
wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. In college McCandless began
emulating Tolstoy's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that first astonished, and then
alarmed, those who were close to him. When the boy headedoff into the Alaska bush, he
entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril,
adversity, and Tol-stoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is
what he found, in abundance.
For most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than held his
own. Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would...