Christopher McCandless into some type of transcendental hero will give us a unique perspective upon the mechanisms by which the society of spectacle recycles even its own negation .
Facts
The particulars of the story are well-known : on April 28 th , 1992 , 24-year-old Christopher McCandless walked into the Alaskan Stampede trail with little more than a . 22 caliber hunting rifle , 400 rounds of ammunition , a ten-pound bag of rice and a dozen paperbacks . He found refuge three days later in an abandoned Fairbanks City Transit bus about forty miles down the trail , where he stayed for the next sixty-seven days , tentatively living off the land until he decided to return to civilization . However , one of the rivers he had crossed on his way to the bus , the Teklanika , has swollen considerably due to rain and snowmelt and proved to be an insurmountable obstacle . Christopher McCandless then returned to the bus where he slowly starved to death for the next forty-six days . At some point , most likely towards the end , he taped a note on the bus ’ door pleading for help . His body was found on September 6 th , nineteen days after his death , by no less than three unrelated parties who happened to come across the bus on that particular day – adding a touch of grim irony to the whole affair . All that Christopher McCandless seems to have left behind is an elliptic log of his Alaskan struggle , which is often referred to as a “ journal ” or “ dairy ,” but actually amounts to little more than bullet entries of usually one or two words , mainly relating which animal he had killed on that day , and a few rolls of camera films containing a series of self-portraits , many of them showing McCandless posing next to the body of a dead animal .
The exact reason for his death has been the subject of extensive speculation : although Krakauer , the “ official ” biographer of Christopher McCandless , has insisted in several occasions that McCandless ingested some poisonous indigenous Alaskan wild potato seeds which were not known to be toxic at the time , multiple analyses of the possible alkaloids and amino-acids contained in said seeds have proven highly inconclusive , and if these seeds are indeed not the ideal food for whoever is already going into “ rabbit starvation ,” their toxicity per se to the human organism has not been scientifically demonstrated . Another factor has come into play recently , in direct relationship with the vast quantity of mushrooms McCandless started to ingest on his eighty-ninth day in the wild . The pictures published in Back to the Wild ( 2011 ) show several specimens known for their toxicity and psychoactive effects , such as the Amanita Muscaria , the potential effects of
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