The unaccompanied pilgrimage of Christopher McCandless across the United States and into the Alaskan Bush captivated the minds of author Jon Krakauer and director Sean Penn. The odyssey of Christopher McCandless has been made into a permanent fixture in American culture through film and text. McCandless set out on his mission to find true happiness and the beauty of the world surrounding him. McCandless embarked on his journey after cutting all ties to the life he had been living. After graduation from Emory University, McCandless abandoned his life in Georgia to set out on his great spiritual crusade after donating his life saving of $25,000 a charity that helps feed the less fortunate called OXFAM. Krakauer's book and Penn's film are consistently parallel with one another through non-linear story telling. The differences where book and movie separate are justifiable in creating effective storytelling for both channels.

The film transcends the idea of time by presenting three separate narratives in a non-chronological order of events. This way of storytelling is not the way a film is traditionally progressed. The first narrative is placed in the present tense. This narrative focuses on McCandless's isolation in the wild of Alaska. McCandless's experience in Alaska was the loneliest segment shown of McCandless's story. McCandless is alone in the Alaskan wild for four months up until his death. Although this is where McCandless dies, it is not all for nothing. In the film McCandless finds true happiness from the isolation he placed himself in. The second narrative is the story told of McCandless's experience in the months leading up to his great Alaskan Excursion. This narrative focuses on the individuals McCandless encountered on his aimless trek across the United States. The film focuses on the influence McCandless had on the lives of the people he encountered along the way. The third narrative is taken back to his life before he left everything behind. The focus of this narrative is to show the emotional trauma of his childhood and the instability of his family. The three separate narratives persistently cross paths throughout the film, jumping from one point in his life to another. The differences of the film and book are a nudge to the philosophy Christopher McCandless lived by. McCandless aimed to completely ignore structure and the way things are supposed to be done. The film shares McCandless characteristic by ignoring the way a film is usually structured.

On the other hand, Krakauer's rendering of the story is not organized by the time periods of McCandless's life, but rather the order of which Krakauer discovers experiences and people that Chris McCandless encounters on his journey. Krakauer begins his book with the encounter of Jim Gallien. Gallien gives McCandless a ride to the edge of the wilderness where McCandless sets off on his adventure. Gallien is the last person to see Christopher McCandless alive (Krakauer 3-9). The chapter directly following Jim Gallien's encounter with McCandless describes the finding of Christopher McCandless's decomposing body and the six people that simultaneously stumbled across the broken down bus that was McCandless's tomb (Krakauer 10-14). Opening the book with McCandless's death is a strategy Krakauer uses in order to tune the book to show hopelessness. Having the assumed protagonist of the story dead before the story even starts forces the reader to focus on every other individual McCandless encounters in his travels. The influence that McCandless had on the people he met, suddenly becomes more important than the journey itself.

Sean Penn created a Chris McCandless that was more personalized than the McCandless in the book. This is accomplished because the film depicts many scenes where McCandless is alone. This is where Sean Penn is forced to create his own depiction of what McCandless is doing. The book is a conglomeration of documented experiences from McCandless personally documented journal as well as the stories told by the people who had encountered McCandless. The film had to create its own assumptions about the things that happened in order to make it into a romanticized journey. An example of this is when the screen shows McCandles walking down long stretches of road and being picked up by a faceless Samaritan offering a ride. It can be assumed that McCandless encountered more people than the people that are described in McCandless journal and Krakauer's text. The last scene of the film shows McCandless slowly drifting into death with an image of his parents as the last thing to cross his mind. This is another example of merging fiction with fact. There is no way of knowing what actually crossed McCandless's mind in the brief moments before his last breath. McCandless was too weak to document this in his journal. This adaptation by Sean Penn allowed for a smoother ending to the film. Penn wanted to have the story of Chris McCandless end in romanticized closure rather than an abrupt end.

In Krakauer's book the story does not end with McCandless death, but instead with Krakauer and the McCandless family visiting the bus where McCandless was found dead. The reason that the last chapter of the book was not included in the movie is because Jon Krakauer is not a character portrayed once in the movie. Having a new unidentified character introduced in the last scene of the film would cause confusion to the audience. Director Sean Penn deliberately did not include Krakauer as a character in the movie in order to create a romanticized journey rather than a documentary. If the Book was translated directly into a film without adapting certain elements, then the film would be classified as a documentary. Penn did not produce a documentary, he created a film that has a story with characters and relationships that would captivate the viewers' attention. In film theory, adapting a book into a film requires certain elements of the book to be dropped or changed where the filmmaker demonstrates artistic license. (Book to Screen -- theTheory) Dropping unimportant scenes is exactly what Penn did when he decided to not to have Krakauer as an element of his film.

In Krakauer's book there is a void in the connection between the reader and McCandless. The void is created by the way the story is told. In the book, McCandless's story is only available through the memories of the people he met. The film fixes this by following McCandless progress through his journey rather than summarize it. The gap between the protagonist and the reader is unavoidable because of the finite amount of information that is known regarding McCandless's journey. The gaps in McCandless's journey are made less distinct through Krakauer's use of his own personal experiences that he strategically places into the book. Krakauer does this in order to fill in the chunks that seem to be missing in McCandless's story. Krakauer's narration includes personal experiences that are relevant to the story. An example of Krakauer's narration is where he explains the circumstances surrounding his decision to learn more about Chris McCandless (Krakauer 47-48). The previous chapter and the chapter following chapter six would seem to skip abruptly without the buffer created by Krakauer's dialogue. Sean Penn created a Christopher McCandless that is not manifested in Krakauer's text. McCandless was an educated man one would not usually be associated with the persona of someone trying to escape from the structure of civilization. A person setting out to escape civilization is stereotypically viewed as a "hippy." While plenty of hippies are educated and intelligent, most people do not view them as so. Christopher McCandless is not a hippy in any sense of the term. Krakauer never describes McCandless to fall under the hippy stereotype and nor does anybody who encountered him. McCandless was an educated man whose intelligence was always quickly noted by everyone whom he encountered on his journey.  Penn's Christopher McCandless needed to be believable to the audience. Penn portrays McCandless to be slightly more hippy-like in order make a more believable protagonist. Penn does this through McCandless's vocabulary choices in the film. Penn's McCandless uses phrases such as "I just want to get out there man, and just be there man". Word choice such as this is usually something that would be freely said by a "tree hugging hippy" and not spoken by a graduate from Emory University. Nowhere in Krakauer's work does it describe McCandless to use such unarticulated language. The People McCandless encounters throughout the book often speak of how they almost immediately realize that McCandless was not the average hitchhiker on account of his evident intelligence.

Text and Film are two similar, but also very different, mediums for storytelling. Both forms are accompanied by their own rules and requirements for producing a finished product. Krakauer designed his book the way he thought would most effectively tell the story of McCandless. Penn had to make a film that would properly tell the story in a similar way the book does while still aiming to create (for lack of a better word) a "successful" film. Maintaining parallels from text to film is increasingly difficult when a director has to follow the rules of film theory. The differences from the book to the film can be explained from the rules known to film making. First, the book has to be read for the understanding of the essential story, the relationships, the goal, the need, the primary conflict and the subtext. Second, the five best scenes from the book need to be decided in order to create a script for the film. Picking only five pivotal scenes can be difficult especially when the book possesses many important points of interest. This helps to shorten the film into a manageable runtime. A film can lose meaning and audience attention when it becomes too long. With every difference aside, Krakauer and Penn both effectively create impactful stories that never stray too far from one another.

