Characterization of Christopher McCandless

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Direct and Indirect Characterization Notes on Christopher McCandless

(Alex Supertramp)

Chapter and page #	Description/quote from novel	What impression you get about Chris with this character trait or description?
Chapter 1, page 4	“Five feet seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be 24 years old and said he was from South Dakota.  He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and ‘live off the land for a few month.’”	Chris is not physically fit for walking into such a dangerous environment.  He seems a little crazy.
Chapter 1, Page 6	Gallion offered to buy Chris some hunting gear because he thought that Chris was not well prepared, but Chris replied by saying, “No thanks anyway, I’ll be fine with what I’ve got.”	Chris seems to think that he knows what he is doing and seems a little cocky. He doesn’t want to take advice from anyone, and he doesn’t want anyone’s sympathy or anyone’s goods.
Chapter 2, Page 12	People who are in the area of the bus spot the bus. They find a not on the outside that reads, “S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke.”	Chris, the once cocky, headstrong, and confident individual is now scared and begging for help.
Chapter 2, Page 14	Starvation was found as the most likely cause of Chris’s death, and he had no identification so no one knew who he was or why he was there.	This shows that Chris didn’t pack himself enough food. He should have carried some form of identification, but he figured he would be okay. Chris was obviously not thinking correctly when he was preparing himself for his journey.
Chapter 3, Page 16	“McCandless was smallish with the hard, stringy physique of an itinerant laborer.”	This shows that Chris wanted to work and do well at it. This shows that he wasn’t a physically big person, but he liked to show his strength and do his best.
Chapter 3, Page 18	“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent. He read a lot. Used a lot of big words.”	Chris is obviously intelligent, and he shows it to the people he meets. He may be trying to his identity, but not his personality.
Chapter 4, Page 29	“McCandless documented the burning of his money and most of the events that followed in a journal- snapshot album.”	You can tell that if McCandless made it out of here alive, he wanted to remember his journey. He kept a diary and pictures to make sure he could remember and probably to be able to show it off to people. This was a major achievement for him.
Chapter 4, Page 34	“It took McCandless most of three days to carry the canoe and his gear to the new canal.”	McCandless did not quit. He carried the canoe for three days, and he probably would have carried it longer if he needed to. He was very motivated, and didn’t surrender to challenges easily.
Chapter 5, Page 40	“Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald’s job, he presented himself as Chris McCandless.”	Chris also gave the restaurant his social security number. This describes Chris because it shows that he was very surprising at times. No one would’ve expected for him to do that, but he did which makes him so different.
Chapter 5, Page 42	“Didn’t like to be around a lot of people, though. Temperamental.”	Chris was probably temperamental because of his family life. He had a bad life at home, and finally got away. He liked to travel by himself and be his own leader.
Chapter 6, Page 48	“McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during his course of hegira.”	For this to have happened, Chris must have been a very kind person. He was obviously a good people person because no one that he visited really had many negative things to say about him. Sure he has some quirks here and there but overall he seemed like a very personable person.
Chapter 6, Page 51	“Over the next few weeks McCandless and Franz spent a lot of time together.”	Even though McCandless didn’t want to become close with anyone, he let himself become close with Franz. He was offered to be adopted but avoided it and realized what he had let happen. He slipped out of Franz’s life easily and painlessly.
Chapter 7, Page 62	“He definitely wasn’t what you’d call mechanically minded”	Even though Chris was smart, he didn’t know how to operate that much machinery. He knew things that you learned in school, but not things that he needed to know for some of the kinds of work ha was doing.
Chapter 7, Page 62	“Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense.”	Chris was book smart but not as smart as we might think. He did not know certain things that you would expect any other normal person to know.
Chapter 10, Page 99	“When he died, McCandless was wearing a blue sweatshirt printed with the logo of a Santa Barbara towing company; when contacted, the wrecking outfit professed to know nothing about him for how he’d acquired the shirt.”	Chris was mysterious and didn’t let people know about things. Also, if he was only wearing a sweatshirt than this shows that he was probably not properly dressed.
Chapter 10, Page 102	“Chris almost always had short hair and was clean- shaven.”	Chris cared about his appearance. It shows that later in the book he did not shave and smelled bad so he simply must have stopped caring.
Chapter 11, Page 107	“He was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial- he always had friends, and everybody liked him- but he could go off and entertain himself for hours.”	This is probably why Chris was so looking forward to this journey. He likes to be independent. He was also very friendly with all of the people that he met, but he kept his distance.
Chapter 11, Page 109	“…reached that 13,000- foot elevation. Chris wanted to keep going to the top. He was only twelve then, so all he could do was complain.”	Maybe this was why he was so glad to be on his own. No one could tell him to stop or that he couldn’t go any farther. You can also see that he was very adventurous from a young age.
Chapter 12, Page 119	“… while Chris had made the dean’s list.”	Even though Chris did not like school at first and thought it was a pointless waste of money, he was a very smart person and after this he began to take interest in school. He mentioned that he would probably have good enough grades to get into Harvard.
Chapter 12, Page 122	“Chris apparently judged artists and close friends by their work, not their life, yet he was temperamentally incapable of extending such lenity to this father.”	They found this strange because his father was such a successful man and Chris judged people by their work. He should have like Walt, but he didn’t. it was probably because of Chris’s home life and because he was around his father so much that Walt wasn’t really a close friends but more of an acquaintance.
Chapter 13, Page 128	“In both photos Chris stares at the lens with the same pensive, recalcitrant squint, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of an important thought and was annoyed to be wasting his time in front of the camera.”	It seems like he isn’t a happy child. He doesn’t want to be taking pictures, and he doesn’t care about leaving memories or being/ acting happy.
Chapter 13, Page 129	“Like Chris, Carine is energetic and self- assured, a high achiever, quick to state an opinion.”	This shows a huge difference then when he was in the picture. We learn so much about him just by reading one sentence. We learn why it was that he got along with his sister so well and how he was in reality. How different he was from the Chris that we know.
Chapter 16, Page 164	“McCandless told Gallien that he intended to remain on the move during his stay at the bush.”	Chris still wasn’t ready to settle down anywhere. He was always on the move, and wouldn’t let anyone stop him for tell him what to do.
Chapter 16, Page 167	“I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.”	Chris did not like to kill animals, and inside he was a soft man. He didn’t like to waste food and felt terrible for this incident.
Chapter 17, Page 182	“He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, “that mattered.”	He seems to need to prove himself. Average isn’t good enough.
Chapter 17, Page 183	“He wrote about hardly anything but food.”	He was proud of having food when he had it, but when he was without it, he felt the need to share his suffering.
Chapter 18, Page 192	“It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mistake as the Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated.”	People thought that he had made the mistake of eating the wrong plant. He only got sick because of the mold on it. It was unfair of people to mock and scold him and believe he was some inexperienced stupid person when they didn’t even know that they were the one who had made a mistake.
Chapter 18, Page 198	“Recognizing the gravity of his predicament, he had abandoned the cocky moniker he’d been using for years, Alexander Supertramp, in favor of the name given to him at birth by his parents.”	In the end, he knew he was dying and decided to use his real name because he was in an actual state of emergency. He was scared, but still managed to try and safe and use the rest of his time wisely.