Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” which is about how life would be better if the government didn’t get involved with the people’s lives. Along with burying his possessions McCandless also takes his money and burns it saying how “ would have done both Thoreau and Tolstory proud” (29). The desert is a spiritual way for people to test themselves like how Chris is able to survive on his own. The passage of from Man in the Landscape, talks of a desert and how the, “leaders of the great religious have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality” (25). Paul Shepard was a writer who wrote about how people seek nature as emotional, psychological growth and development. The relation to McCandless is that in the same way he travels on his own hitchhiking to try and get to his destination of Alaska. The passage is about how some want to be and travel west. Stegner writings where sometimes based on the west.
Also Krakauer adds in a passage from Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space. Chris himself, “wanted excitement and danger” (15) by leaving his home and going on an adventure. The passage in Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness it speaks of wanting more and the urge to break away from normal life and seek new things. Leo Tolstoy was a Christian and his literary techniques come from the teachings of Jesus. Krakauer tries to set a mood to the reader of the tragic way McCandless died. The laughter of sadness could be the mourning of the discovery of the body of McCandless. Only a bus stands in the forest and inside it is the body of Chris McCandless. The forest in this case is the Alaskan forest where nothing was around, empty and lifeless. The piece of wood found with the passage from Jack London’s White Fang, the passage speaks of a forest that is lifeless and depressing and a “hint in it of laughter” but the laughter isn’t cheerful but was “more terrible than any sadness” (9). Their actions cost them their life in the end. In the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, both the main character of the short story and McCandless venture into the wilds of Alaska alone and ignore the warnings of other. McCandless was a vivid reader of his favorite authors like Jack London. The postcard foreshadows that something will happen to Chris and he won’t be coming back indicating the possible chance of him dying. In the postcard Chris states that “ adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from again” (3).
The postcard sent to Wayne Westerberg from Chris McCandless talks about how this will be the last postcard Chris will send.