Discussion Topic

Examples of pathos in Into the Wild

Summary:

Examples of pathos in Into the Wild include the emotional struggles of Chris McCandless and his family. Chris's letters and journal entries reveal his inner turmoil and desire for freedom, while his family's grief and confusion over his disappearance and death evoke deep sympathy. These elements highlight the human cost of his journey and decisions.

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What are examples of pathos in Into the Wild?

In using pathos, an author appeals to the emotions of the reader. To be convincing, a written work must use both pathos and logos. Logos is an appeal to logic: it persuades through use of facts, statistics, and other details. In Into the Wild, Krakauer effectively uses both pathos and logos, but here we will focus solely on pathos.

Krakauer primarily uses pathos to urge us to sympathize with McCandless. After Krakauer wrote the original article about Chris that led to his book, many readers were convinced Chris was foolish, impulsive, and possibly suicidal. In this book, Krakauer instead paints a much more positive picture of his subject as an idealist whose plans went awry.

One way Krakauer builds pathos is by showing how the young, handsome, and charismatic Chris befriended people who were older or perhaps a little odd. He touched lives by living in simplicity and reaching out to people who struck him as authentic. One such friendship was with the eighty-year-old Ron Franz, and Franz would later speak about how close he felt to Chris:

“Even when he was sleeping, I was happy just knowing he was there.” At one point Franz dared to make a special request of McCandless. “My mother was an only child,” he explains. “So was my father. And I was their only child. Now that my own boy’s dead, I’m the end of the line. When I’m gone, my family will be finished, gone forever. So I asked Alex if I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson.”

This request touches our hearts because it shows how deeply Franz felt affection for McCandless and speaks to the influence the young man had on the people he met. We feel good about McCandless because of this story.

Krakauer handles McCandless's death with pathos, showing how brave and happy Chris looked and acted even in his last days. As we can see, from the passage quoted at length below, the many details Krakauer includes touch our emotions and build our sympathy for him:

McCandless penned a brief adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!” Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. . . . One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours— because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

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What are five examples of pathos in Into the Wild?

I'll take Pathos to mean 'a quality that evokes pity or sadness' and in that sense, there are many examples in Into the Wild, the following being just a few:

1. At the point at which McCandless leaves Wayne Westerberg's farm for the last time, we learn that he got drunk on his final night, had a wild night in which he revealed for the first time that 'he knew how to play' piano, a brief demonstration of a talent that he had honed for many years but that he was too modest to show. This is made pathetic (in the true sense of that word, i.e. full of pathos) when he then cries at the point of his departure the next morning at the end of Chapter Seven. His tears invoke a sense of his own knowledge of the risks that he is going to take which is when one of his fellow farm workers "started to have a bad feeling that we wouldn't never see Alex again." He is clearly well liked and people wished greatly to know him better; he has the capacity to create joy in others, an element of pathos that we feel as a result of his demise. 

2. There is a good deal of pathos to the scene before his departure from the Slablands RV area when he is on his final night in Jan Burres's RV, watching 'an NFL playoff game' on TV. Burres notices that he was 'rooting especially hard for the Washington Redskins' and she asks him if that's where he is from. He tells her that he is but, despite spending considerable amounts of time together over weeks, she claims 'That's the only thing he ever let on about his background'. It is clear that throughout this whole episode, McCandless has both considerable warmth and consideration for others but is only able to connect with people to a certain extent due to the self-imposed distance he placed between himself and them. 

3. Westerberg discusses McCandless's naivety during his stay with them, describing him as having 'gaps in his thinking' such as the occasion on which he attempted to cook a chicken in a microwave over and left it full of grease as he could not figure out that the grease had nowhere to drain. There is pathos to this event particularly because if such everyday things are at times beyond the romantic but slightly impractical McCandless, this incompetence foreshadows that which leads to his demise in Alaska where, despite being skilled enough to survive alone for a while, his oversights limit his chance of survival. 

4. For all of his dislike of the commercial world and self-abasement with menial manual labour, there is tremendous pathos to the account of McCandless's commercial acumen and salesmanship. At the end of Chapter 11 we discover, for example, that he worked for a local building contractor in his home town who had 'offered to pay for Chris's college education' if he would continue to work for him. It is particularly poignant that if Chris had been able to reconcile himself to his capacity to earn money, he might have done more of the good and, long-term, have bought more freedom for himself and others. The tremendous potential he had makes for greater pathos in his demise. 

5. There is tremendous pathos to one of the very small accounts within the book from McCandless's time working in McDonalds. We discover that part of his self-imposed difference from others is a dislike of wearing socks. When questioned about this and told that he must wear socks if he is to be employed, he agrees for the time that he is working but 'as soon as his shift was over, bang! - the first thing he'd do is peel those socks off'. The pathos of this scene is two-fold: that an Emory graduate maintains such moral integrity that he will live his principals so fully that he will work at McDonalds in order to maintain his absolute freedom might inspire sadness in some. However, perhaps more poignant still is his willingness to accede to corporate rules only until the moment his shift ended, as if the wearing of socks required such an act of will that it constrained him. It is full of pathos that a young man felt the need to maintain such distance from himself and conformity that he had to make ever grander and more protracted statements of difference that eventually led to his death. 

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How does Krakauer use pathos to manipulate emotions in Into the Wild?

The main way that pathos is created in the audience is through the interviews that he conducts with people in McCandless's life.

In particular, two interview sessions produce the most sadness and empathy both for Chris and for those who loved and lost him.

The first one is with his family. His mother, father and sister are very obviously distraught about his death, so much that there is crying during the interview and expressions of guilt and helplessness.

The other particularly striking interview is with the man who lost his own family in a car accident, Ron Franz. This man changed his whole entire life in order to live the life that "Alex"  encouraged him to lead.

The initial response to hearing McCandless's story is to think that he is insane or stupid for his decision. However, thru his use of pathos, Krakauer makes the readers understand "Alex" on a more personal level and makes his death seem tragic instead of ridiculous

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How is pathos used in Into the Wild to evoke empathy for Chris McCandless?

Jon Krakauer explicitly states in the introduction that while he attempted to tell the story as objectively as possible, authorial bias creeped in due to his own empathy for Chris. Throughout, Chris's mistakes are contrasted with his noble goals, and Krakauer even contrasts an event from his own life. The most obvious example of pathos is the relationship between Chris and his parents; it is clear from the subtext that Chris loved his parents, but was unable to reconcile his love with his own ideals. In one anecdote, this love is clearly shown:

[Chris] got real emotional. He was almost crying, fighting back the tears, telling Dad that even though they'd had their differences over the years, he was grateful for all the things Dad had done for him. Chris said how much he respected Dad for starting from nothing, working his way through college, busting his ass to support eight kids.
(Krakauer, Into the Wild, Amazon.com)

Along with the occasional interjection from other characters about how Chris should contact his family, this shows both Chris's alienation from society and his determination to follow his personal ideals. Chris refused to compromise, even when it was clear that he understood and appreciated his parents for their hard work and sacrifice. By appealing to the connection that most people feel with their own parents, Krakauer adds a subtle layer of empathy to Chris and his situation, even if it is moderation by Chris's own deliberate desire to cut his parents out of his life.

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How is pathos used in the book Into the Wild?

One good example of pathos comes when Chris meets Ron Franz, an old man who feels an immediate connection to the wandering youth. Franz, who acted as a mentor for many young boys, felt so emotionally connected to Chris that he offered to legally adopt him, but Chris's philosophy prohibited intimate emotional connections and he refused. To Chris, this was another example of his ideals and the sacrifices he needed to make for his personal growth; to Franz, it was a rejection of their friendship at a deeper level.

...their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he'd been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as he'd arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.
(Krakauer, Into the Wild, Amazon.com)

Franz never saw Chris again, and the news of Chris's death came as a shock. In his last years, Franz adopted some of Chris's philosophy and traveled; in the personal interviews from the book, it is clear that he felt almost betrayed by Chris's rejection. The comparison between Franz's feelings and Chris's refusal even to contact his own family makes Franz's situation even sadder.

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