McCandless’ Relationship With Franz

Franz feels like he has a son and McCandless feels like he is helping an old man. He considers him as a temporary father figure. Franz fills that fatherly role, because he will give advice to McCandless and also helps him financially.

The drawback is that McCandless tends to abandon the people he grows close with. Franz was devastated when McCandless left and later passed away. Franz fills that fatherly role, because he will give advice to McCandless and also helps him financially. However, McCandless left after Franz got too attached.

McCandless did not fly to Alaska as it would be considered cheating. He believed that if he was going on this journey, he needed to be ‘all in.’ At the end of chapter 7 McCandless sends a letter to Bob and Jan that states ‘This is the last communication that you shall receive from me. I now walk out to live amongst the wild. Take care, it was great knowing you”(69).

This letter was his way of saying that he made it without help and that it is possible. He was very determined and wanted to complete this trip without and delay. When Westerburg “asked Mccandless to postpone his departure and work a week or two longer,” he would even consider it (67).

Walt and Chris McCandless were both intelligent. Walt was in a good career and Chris got good grades in school with little to no effort. Another quality that they had in common is that they in control. Chris did not like to listen to people even when they were just trying to give him advice, and this was the same with Walt.

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Chris also shared his musical talent of singing and playing the piano with his father.

One characteristic that McCandless demonstrated early on was that he often refused to take advice and that, “He resisted instruction of any kind”(111). Chris refused to change his way of doing things. This is something that he would demonstrate later as he ignored the advice of those who he met while hitch-hiking to take on a different lifestyle. Also,“Chris was fearless even when he was little…He didn’t think the odds applied to him. We [his family] were always trying to pull him back from the edge”(109). This led to him often taking risks that would later lead to his death. He also had a tendency to test the boundaries set around him. One of the members of his cross-country team noted,“He was really into pushing himself,”(112). This later became a regular characteristic we saw during the many adventures that he took alone. We saw this during his boat trip into Mexico and in his later trip into Alaska. Most of the extremes that McCandless demonstrated later in his life are reflections of characteristics that he had developed early on.