into the wild

In the book Into The Wild the author John Krakauer claims that his book is mainly about a son’s relationship with his father. I only partly agree with his statement. I think part of the reason Chris left his family was because he had issues with his father.  That is only a small part of why Chris ditched his normal life. I believe that Chris left because he wanted to find himself and the true meaning of life.

Chris didn’t want to have to please his mom and dad with good grades and stuff.  He wanted to be totally independent and not have his parents as a safety net to fall back on. He wanted to live his own life without any outside pressures or expectations of what he should or shouldn’t do with his life. During the first half of his life, and by that I mean before he became Alexander Supertramp, Chris was living his life for his parents; he did everything they wanted him to do. Anything that he did, he did to please his parents and make them proud. Every parents' dream is to see their kid grow up and watch them go to college and graduate.  After Chris had done that, he felt that he had accomplished what his parents wanted, and now it was finally time that he could go off and live his own life and do the things that he wanted to do without having to answer to anyone.

Ever since childhood Chris has had differences and problems between him and his father, but so does every little boy. Seriously, nobody gets along perfectly with their parents, it’d be weird if you did. Chris might have had more so than others, but his dad wasn’t a horrible man. He made his fair share of mistakes, but so does every father and every kid, and they both need to forgive each other. I wouldn’t have given Chris’s parents the Mom and Dad of the Year award, but I also wouldn’t give Chris the Child of the Year award either. His parents loved him and meant well with everything they did. Whether or not it was right or wrong is another question, but all one can ask of their parents is to love them, and Walt and Billie did that. I am just trying to normalize the clash between Chris and his father, because I think this book dramatizes the relationship between the father and son. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t a factor in Chris’s life, but I think the book focused a little too much on that, when there were bigger motivators for Chris to do what he did. If daddy issues were the main reason Chris did what he did, then we would have a lot more kids following in Chris’s footsteps. The only effect the relationship between Chris and his parents had on Chris’s whole trip was the fact that he did not keep in contact with them. I believe that even if Chris had gotten along really well with his parents that he still would have done everything that he did, except while he was doing it I think he would have still talked to his parents as he moved about the country. It was inevitable that Chris was one day going to go off on a trip like this, and I don’t have a problem with that.  The only thing that I think he did wrong was not talk to his parents. Chris’s flaw was that he was too harsh a judge on his parents because they didn’t deserve to be kept in the dark about what Chris was doing.