( 115 ) What he fails to mention , however , is that the moose debacle is followed by seven empty entries – the first to appear on the log – which seems to indicate that McCandless was already losing enthusiasm in his great Alaskan adventure and perhaps also skipping meals . The following entries do not indicate any game of any sort , and seventeen days after having shot and wasted the moose , McCandless sets out to return to civilization , with the failed result that we know . A close-reading of his log tends to indicate that the moose disaster is not just a simple setback , but a decisive sobering blow of reality , which leads to his attempted escape about two weeks later . It appears that McCandless was much less in control of the phenomena that surrounded him than Krakauer would have us believe in order to portray a brave and resolute young man rather than a grown-up child who just got lost in the woods .
Krakauer ’ s treatment of the story betrays a deep identification with his subject , as he turns a marginal , quite incoherent young man into a seeker of almost transcendental proportions , and does his very best to piece together the portrait of a pure soul rebelling against the rigid structures of society . The truth of the matter is that the meanderings of McCandless prior to his expedition to Alaska , as well as his childhood and youth , can only fill about two thirds of Into the Wild , the remaining pages being devoted to retrace other famous disappearances in the wilderness prior to that of McCandless , including , and naturally presented last , a risky adventure of the author himself when he was about the same age as his subject . By the end of Into the Wild , McCandless ’ story has become a reason to tell a personal adventure , which , all truth be told , exhibits a superior narrative authority when compared to that of McCandless himself . Krakauer does acknowledge in his preface a certain degree of identification with McCandless ; however , there is a far cry between admitting not to be an “ impartial biographer ” ( 3 ) and inserting a detailed , totally unrelated personal adventure into the account of someone else ’ s life . The elliptic , very suggestive data at our disposal concerning McCandless Alaskan adventure is naturally propitious to subjective interpretation and easy to appropriate ; the narrative thus becomes the expression of the receiver ’ s concerns along the purest lines of reader ’ s response theory , where the true message of the text depends exclusively upon the recipient and appears by itself deprived of any definite intentionality . The mere textual economy of Into the Wild , which dedicates more than a third of its narrative to matters other than McCandless ’ misadventure , seems to illustrate the vacuity of the subject itself , as if the life and times of Christopher McCandless were simply not enough to fill an entire book and the author felt obliged to supplement the
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