Author John Krakauer was inspired by the story of a young man's trek through the Alaskan wilderness enough to research his life and write a non-fiction novel. Sean Penn, a film director, was inspired by the novel and the same man's story to make a film about the man's two years of living in the wilderness. Chris McCandless was a young man who decided to trek through the West and head into Alaska after graduating from Emory University. He left no notice to his family of his plans and instead made his way from place to place with no money, little possessions, and his charm and personality. After trekking through the West for two years, McCandless finally made his way to Alaska where he survived for over one hundred days by living in an abandoned bus before passing away. Because he did not leave much evidence, Krakauer had to rely on the people McCandless made bonds with and his family to write of his travels and why he chose to do what he did. In the book and film respectively, Krakauer uses epigraphs, his limited first-hand knowledge of the events, and a non-chronological timeline while Penn uses narration, a broad focus of the subjects, and an unchronological timeline to tell the decisions of McCandless to trek through the wild and his time spent there.

Krakauer begins each chapter of his novel with an epigraph that corresponds to the material of the chapter and give insight to where McCandless' beliefs were born and how they influenced him to explore the West. Some of McCandless' favorite authors were Henry David Thoreau and Jack London, authors who both talked of the freedom of the wild and embracing nature. One novel found in the bus after McCandless' death had a highlighted portion that read "I wanted movement and not the calm course of existence" (Krakauer 15). This quote by Leo Tolstoy from "Family Happiness" reveals that McCandless wanted to move, he wanted to explore and live a life away from everyone else's normal, boring way of life. Another quote was from Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago which read "You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old, familiar, peaceful days" (Krakauer 103). McCandless believed that he, and life, had a greater purpose than staying at home, getting an office job, and starting a family. McCandless believed that he had to have adventure. He believed he had to find himself and to do that he would have venture into the wilderness and live there to find his true happiness.

In the film, Penn uses narration mostly by the actress portraying Carine McCandless, McCandless' sister, to illustrate their past and childhood. Many times when McCandless is shown in the wild, smiling and enjoying life, his sister's voice is talking over him to reveal their childhood of fighting parents and lies. His parents were frequents fighters, while McCandless was a loving boy who was peaceful and made friends easily. He wanted to get away from his parents' harsh attitudes and tight upbringings. McCandless and his father Walt did not get along especially well, his father always pushing for more and better things while McCandless was content with his life. McCandless was also bitter towards his father when he learned of the lies he kept, of cheating on his mother with his ex-wife. His sister reveals that McCandless wanted to get away from the control and rigor that his father pushed, he wanted the freedom to do what he wanted and to live without the stress of fighting parents and the lies that prevented McCandless from seeing them the same ever again. By having the sister narrate their childhood, the audience is to see McCandless happy in the wilderness compared to how unhappy he was in his childhood. By escaping into the wild McCandless is able to find himself and become his own person away from his controlling parents.

Krakauer is able to share McCandless' brief life from interviews with his family and friends and his time in the wild by McCandless' journal found in the bus, but he is unable to unearth the true reasons and thoughts of McCandless because he is limited in his sources. Much of McCandless' life is able to be told but his inner thoughts and reasonings are not because there is no access to McCandless himself, there can only be assumptions made. Krakauer is able to make some of these assumptions from his own experiences in the wild and the journal McCandless left behind. Krakauer took a trip into the wild to climb a mountain, barely survived, and is able to tie that into McCandless' adventure by claiming "we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul" (Krakauer 155). He believes that because they both had bad relations with their fathers and obsession with nature, that they had the same reason for trekking into the wilderness. The journal, while giving day to day happenings, contains little details and only the basics for the day. For example, the first week in Alaska, the journal was filled with the words "Weakness", "Snowed in", and "Disaster" (Krakauer 164) but on July 5th he wrote "Disaster ... Rained in. River looks Impossible. Lonely, scared" (Krakauer 170). Even with the extra details, the thoughts of McCandless are limited and offered from a zoomed out shot in the novel.

Contrasting to Krakauer, Penn uses artistic license in the film to offer close up shots with the camera to focus on the character's faces which allows the audience to pick up on the emotions and connect with the characters more efficiently. In the dinner scene after McCandless' graduation, the camera focuses mainly on the faces of the family. Not much is shown of the restaurant or their location in the restaurant, just the faces of the family and the strain the conversation brings to the characters. By doing this, the audience is able to read the annoyance of McCandless when his father offers to buy him a new car, the worried expression of his sister, the elation of his mother, and the sternness of his father. It allows the watcher to get a true sense for what their feeling and connect and empathize for each character more. When Ronald Franz, one of the last people McCandless met on his trip to Alaska, drives McCandless to his final stop he offers to adopt the young man. McCandless, being awkward with family, avoids it and promises to talk of it after he gets back from his trip. As McCandless is leaving, the camera zooms into Franz's face and shows one lone tear tracking down his cheek. By focusing on the faces of the characters in the movie, there is more of a sense of connection with each of them. It allows them to become more relatable and it becomes more of a poignant scene when McCandless dies and the watcher imagines how his friends and family will react of the news of his passing.

In the first few chapters of the novel, Krakauer reveals the fate of McCandless before backtracking and telling of his childhood and time in college. The novel is told in a very unchronological order that focuses on each different chapter of McCandless' life and the people he has touched. There are also chapters devoted to other people like McCandless, people who went into the wild and did no return, and Krakauer's own experience in the wild as well. By doing jumping around, Krakauer is able to reveal the aftermath of McCandless' death and how it affected the people he met along the way to Alaska. After learning of McCandless' death Franz, for instance, "renounced the Lord ... and became an atheist" (Krakauer 60) because he did not believe God should let a boy like McCandless die. McCandless' mother questioned why he would make the choices he did and later, a year after his death, was able to come to peace with it while his father was able to understand McCandless more after visiting the bus where he died. By not telling the story chronologically, it allows Krakauer to be free in how he tells of the aftermath of McCandless' death, comparing others to McCandless, and his childhood that shaped his decision to trek into Alaska.

Penn tells the story in a stricter form, showing McCandless in the wild before flashing back to his childhood and the people he met on the way to Alaska. Penn focuses on McCandless more than the other characters, unlike Krakauer. McCandless is shown enjoying his life in the wild and time spent with the friends he makes and places he stays in temporarily. There are no comparisons of other people trekking into the wild. There are no looks into the future to show how the people he touched have fared. The ending scene is the most recent shot of McCandless' life and that is his death, there are no peeks into how his family or friends are doing or how they take the news of his death. By making the film less sporadic, the film is able to focus more on McCandless and the specific events of his life that make his choose to trek into the wild and his adventures once he is actually in the wild on his own and free from society.

Krakauer and Penn are forced to use the limited knowledge of McCandless' life to document and interpret it into a book and film respectively. Krakauer used epigraphs, broader shots of McCandless' life, and time jumps of his life to illuminate McCandless' decisions to trek into the wild and leave his life behind. Penn, on the other hand, employed narration, close ups for emotion, and a more structured time line to show the short life of McCandless. Though they used different techniques, both were able to use the little information they had to tell the life and death of Chris McCandless and his trip into the wild.

