river .” On the notebooks left in the bus by Carine McCandless , one can read fairly disturbing messages , such as that of a woman who wrote that she had been “ a bitch ” to her boyfriend right before he fell into the Teklanika and signed off “ asking for good luck because it was raining .”
Rather than courage , or “ guts ,” a word commonly used by his supporters , including Sean Penn , to characterize their hero , Christopher McCandless ’ misadventure demonstrated ignorant recklessness , for which he paid the ultimate price , and his irresponsibility and indecisive behavior seem to be his only concrete legacy : the simple question of why starving to death in the back of a derelict bus should be a lesson to us all and an example to follow is still to be answered . There naturally cannot be any McCandless “ philosophy ” in the strict sense of the word , for the concept of a civilized man returning to nature is an utter epistemological fallacy , about as absurd as the idea of traveling back in time , however entertaining it might be : our very conscience is the product of our time and culture and we do not shed what we are by simply walking into the wild grossly unprepared . If there is an epistemological demonstration in the McCandless story , it only points to the impossibility of blindly denying progress and civilization , which are parts of our very ontological integrity : as McCandless walked into the wild , he also walked into nothingness .
If Christopher McCandless ’ so called “ philosophy ” remains as vague as can be , what appears fairly clear , however , is the direct responsibility of his official promoters , Krakauer , Penn and the McCandless family , whose construction of a fictitious character of metaphysical proportions has lured many into believing they could discover the true meaning of life by putting it at risk undertaking a superfluously dangerous hike . Of course , the trek is reserved to the true fans : the McCandless family , already enlightened , have used helicopters to reach the bus .
The spectacularization and subsequent merchandizing of Christopher McCandless have benefited from factors totally external to its main promoters , starting with the very name of the hero : chances are the story would have flown quite lower had the name of its protagonist been Archibald Higginbotham rather than Christopher McCandless , whose semiotic implications within the Judeo-Christian code are difficult to ignore : not only is Saint Christopher the patron saint of all things related to travel and travelers in the Catholic tradition , but it also includes “ Christ ” as a prefix , which graphically conveys an undeniable onomastic authority – more so than Archibald . The last name , “ McCandless ,” establishes as well a subtle semiotic relationship between form and function , for the fictionalized McCandless rejects progress and civilization , pure products of the Enlightenment which could
27