Into the Wild to Kill the False Self

After watching the beautifully made film, Into the Wild, one haunting question continues to echo: Why does Chris McCandless venture into the wilds of Denali National Park in Alaska?

The words he scratches into a piece of scrap wood in the "magic" bus reveal he tramped into the wilderness to find freedom, to escape the poisons of civilization, to flee his family, and to embrace adventure. Most telling of all, however, McCandless refers to his great Alaskan adventure as a climactic battle "to kill the false being within."

Killing the false self is his primary motivation, I would contend, and he succeeds, though not in the way he expected.

McCandless wanders into the wilderness assuming that the "false self" in need of killing is the self defined by money and career and "success" of a certain type. It is the self created for him by his father, a self he despises. He shreds his credit cards, adopts the moniker Alexander Supertramp, and embarks on a journey of hitchhiking, camping, and canoeing. His time of penniless living on the road peels away those layers of false identity, leaving him with a purer, rawer sense of self. It is not enough, however. The false self still breathes, if only weakly, and so McCandless goes into the Alaskan back country to deal the final death blow.

Near the end of his time in Alaska, however, he discovers another false self--one created by himself, but one as equally as false as his father's materialism. He enters the wilderness believing himself to be the strong, independent wanderer who loves life, who experiences it first hand apart from the buffer of civilization, and, most importantly, who needs no one. Throughout the film he shuns relationships. He's not anti-social--he makes friends easily and engages in meaningful conversations--but he doesn't need people, or so he thinks.

One conversation with his friend and surrogate grandfather Ron Franz reveals much. He tells Ron, as they sit together on a promontory overlooking the desert, "You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience." Meaning comes from experiencing the world around us, he claims, not from relationships with others. In his own family life, relationships have been marked by lies and deception and posing. He wants truth. He wants real experience. He tells Ron, "The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences," and he encourages him to leave his lonely house and see something new.

Ron promises the twenty-three year old McCandless that he will "take stock of that," and then he offers some reflections of his own. He tells Chris, "when you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines through you." On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on their perch.

McCandless doesn't initially understand (or at least appreciate) Ron's wisdom. Ron reminds McCandless of the divine beauty of human relationships, without denying his praise of new experiences. Sure, one might find enlightenment in the wilderness, but God reveals himself much closer to home. The divine light is seen even more clearly in the love of forgiveness. McCandless' false self of rugged independence shrugs off such sentimentality, however, and McCandless eventually leaves Ron to follow his quest to Alaska.

McCandless initially exults in his Alaskan solitude. But as the weeks progress, he finally feels loneliness. He highlights a passage in Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness, indicating the beginning erosion of the false self:

"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. . . . I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people for whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor--such is my idea of happiness."

Later, he even writes in the margins of a book, "Happiness only real when shared." He came to Alaska to "kill the false being within," and now he has succeeded. The strong, independent wanderer who needs no one, Alexander Supertramp, has died.

The final scene of redemption confirms his transformation. Suffering from the final stages of starvation, he writes a farewell note and signs his name, Christopher Johnson McCandless, claiming the family and the father he despised and abandoned. Then, as he lies down and prepares to take his last breath, he has a vision of the homecoming he'll never experience. He meets his parents in front of his childhood Atlanta home and embraces them, the smile spreading across his face. The prodigal has finally come home. He's finally forgiven his parents. On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on his tear-stained face as he gasps his final breath.