Terra Incognita: Literary Maps and Nature Representations in Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Ricardo Pereira da
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/gaudiumsciendi.2013.2623

Into the Wild (1996) is an expansion of an article that Jon Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine about a young man named Chris McCandless. McCandless had strong ideals about rejecting society and communing with nature. This book presents a chronicle of the two years of Chris McCandless's life, from the time he left Emory University until his death. Enabling us to grasp reality, language plays the most important role in the conception and reinforcement of an ethos to better comprehend our relationship with nature. In Into the Wild, Krakauer demonstrates the dangers of using metaphors to represent Nature by retracing the steps of Christopher McCandless's journey to Alaska. In this article, we propose an analysis of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild from an eco-critical point of view, intending to demonstrate how literature can be a catalyst of change for the current environmental crisis.