The Would-Be Hero's Journey:
Into the Wild and The Call of the Wild

The journey into the wilderness of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless is depicted in Sean Penn's docudrama, Into the Wild; Jon Krakauer's¹ similarly titled biography (on which the film is based); and Ron Lamothe's documentary, Call of the Wild. It is a forme fruste of the archetypal journey of the hero described by comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell,² in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Campbell explored a number of myths in a variety of cultures and found that they had a similar structure. Despite the diversities of incident, setting, and costume, the myths of the world offer only a limited number of responses to the riddle of life. From behind a thousand faces the single hero emerges, the archetype of all myths. Calling this archetype the "monomyth," Campbell provides an overview:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.²

The accounts of Osiris, Prometheus, Moses, Buddha, Theseus, Christ, and the prisoner in Plato's Myth of the Cave (Republic, Book Vll), for example, follow this structure very closely. Campbell writes: "The hero is symbolical of the divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life."²

Unfortunately, although McCandless ventured forth, encountered fabulous forces, and found a boon ("happiness is meant to be shared"), he was unable to return to bestow it on his fellow man. His was an aborted hero quest. Nonetheless, his story is informative. We can learn much about what may go wrong and why from the 3 accounts. We all have the option to accept or decline the mental, physical, or spiritual journey, and the heroes preceding us can be positive or negative role models.

After graduating from Emory University with honors, in 1990, McCandless gave his $24,000 life savings to Oxfam International (whose funds are used to feed the malnourished and starving of the world), and set out on his peregrinations with his blue backpack, using the name "Alexander Supertramp." McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and South Dakota. Along the way, he worked and took pride in surviving with minimal equipment and funds, generally making little preparation for his expeditions. In April 1992, he hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he entered the wilderness with a 10-lb sack of rice and a gun.

After living successfully in an abandoned bus for several months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River. He returned to the bus and apparently died of starvation, possibly secondary to ingesting moldy wild potato seeds or wild sweet pea plant, which resembled the former but was poisonous.

Some consider McCandless a hero who, like Thoreau, "advanced confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavored to live the life he had imagined." Others view him as an unprepared fool, a greenhorn who wanted to commune with nature but who had fundamentally misjudged the wilderness and attempted to live entirely off the land without having bothered to master the requisite skills.

This touches on the question of McCandless's apparent psychiatric difficulties. Consider, for example, his problems with intimacy. Krakauer writes: