Characterization of Christopher McCandless

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.
Page 6	“I tried to scare him with bear stories.  I told him that a twenty-two probably wouldn’t do anything to a grizzly except make him mad.  Alex didn’t seem too worried. ‘I’ll climb a tree’ is all he said.”	Chris doesn’t seem to be scared so easily.  He seems very determined.
Chapter 2
Page 13	“The body was taken to Anchorage, where an autopsy was performed at the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory.  The remains were so badly decomposed that it was impossible to determine exactly when McCandless had died, but the coroner could find no sign of massive internal injuries or broken bones.”	Chris had been in the bus for a long time while injured.  Therefore he died as a result because he was not being taken care of.
Page 12/13	“I stood on a stump, reached through a back window, and gave it a shake.  There was definitely something in it, but whatever it was didn’t weigh much.  It wasn’t until I walked around to the other side and saw a head sticking out that I knew exactly what it was.”	He was smart enough to try and warm himself up inside the sleeping bag throughout the winter time in Alaska.
Chapter 3
Page 18	“It was a different story with Alex.  He was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen.  Didn’t matter what it was, he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole.  And he never quit in the middle of something.  If he started a job he finished it” said Westerberg.	Ever though Westerberg only knew Chris as Alex he still saw that he had pride in whatever job he did.  He stuck to it even the real gross and dirty ones.
Page 18	“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent.  He read a lot.  Used a lot of big words.  I think maybe part of what got him in trouble was that he did too much thinking.  Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were so bad to each other so often.	This says a lot about how smart Alex really is.  He seems like he would analyze every single situation that he encountered, by the way that Westerberg described him.
Chapter 4
Page 32	“Although, in retrospect, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me.  Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.” Walt said this.	Walt always kind of knew to himself that Chris would abandon all of his material possessions that he didn’t need.
Page 37	“…… to get an ID and a job but feels extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately.”	Chris says that he feels uncomfortable in society now and longs for the road.  He must be depending on himself and no other people.
Chapter 5
Page 40	“One thing I do remember is that he had a thing about socks.  He always wore shoes without socks – just plain couldn’t stand to wear socks.  But McDonald’s has a rule that employees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times.  That means shoes and socks.  Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang! – the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off.	According to this passage Chris has one weird little quirk about wearing socks.  To keep his job he just dealt with wearing socks.
Page 40	“He was reliable, though, a body showed up every day, so they didn’t fire him.  They only paid twenty-four an hour, and with all he casinos right across the river starting people at six twenty-five, well, it was hard to keep bodies behind the counter.”	However, it sounds like even if no one really cared for him it didn’t matter because they needed him.
Chapter 6
Page 51	“I thought he was too nice a kid to be living by that hot springs with those nudists and drunks and dope smokers.”	It seems like Franz really cared for what was best for Chris.
Page	“Sometimes we’d drive for hours without saying a word.  Even when he was sleeping, I was happy just knowing he was there.	Franz really develops a father-like figure towards Chris.  This shows that he is a real giving and open-hearted person.
Chapter 7
Page 63	“He was kind of shy at first.  He acted like it was hard for him to be around people.  I figured that it was because he’d spent so much time by himself.”	Westerberg’s mother really had to warm up to Alex to bring out his real personality.
Page 65	“Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have a family someday.  You could tell he didn’t take relationships lightly.”	This quote really shows what Chris’ type of character is.  Also how he views and respects women.
Chapter 10
Page 101/102	“His hair was long, and he had a beard.  Chris almost always had short hair and was clean-shave.  And the face in the picture was extremely gaunt.  But I knew right away.  There was no doubt.  It was Chris.”	Sam, Chris’ brother, describes Chris’s typical physical features.
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Chapter 11
Page 109	“Chris was fearless even when he was little.  He didn’t think the odds applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge.”	Walt tells u that the fearless aspect of Chris stuck with him practically his whole life.
Page 110	“He quit partly because he didn’t like being told what to do but also because of me.  I wanted to be like Chris, so I started to play French horn, too.  And it turned out to be the one thing that I was better at than he was.  When I was a freshman and he was a senior, I made first chair in the senior band, and there was no way he was going to sit behind his sister.”	This family has many gifted people who are extraordinary at multiple things.  Chris is usually better at most things than his sister Carine.  However she started to play the French horn just like Chris and beat him at it.
Chapter 12
Page 122	“If something bothered him, he wouldn’t come right out and say it.  He’d keep it to himself, harboring his resentment, letting the bad feelings build and build.”	Chris kept practically everything to himself.  Apparently he also kept his own emotions to himself as well.
Page 125	“And he knew that if he’d written or called me, Mom and Dad would find out where he was, fly out there, and try to bring him home.”	Sadly Chris knew all of this and sadly this is what kept him continuing a great relationship with his sister Carine.
Chapter 13
Page 128	“That summer he disappeared he’d wanted to take Buck with him.  After he graduated from Emory, he asked Mom and Dad if he could come get Buck, but they said no, because Buckley had just been hit by a car and was still recovering…… Chris didn’t think twice about risking his own life, but he never would have put Buckley in any kind of danger.”	This is important because Buckley, the dog, could have kept Chris from dying.  Just like Carine said in the quote Chris cared about other people and animals so he could still be alive maybe even today.
Page 131	“His name was printed wrong.  The label said CHRISTOPHER R. MCCANDLES.  His middle initial is really J.  It ticked me off that they didn’t get it right.  I was mad.  Then I thought, ‘Chris wouldn’t care.  He’d think it was funny.’ ”	This is important because it shows how little Chris actually cares about the little things like the coroner’s office getting his middle initial wrong.
Chapter 16
Page 159	“Alex was clean-shaven and had short hair, and I could tell by the language he used that he was a real sharp fella.  He wasn’t what you’d call a typical hitchhiker.”	This shows that sometime he kept a good apearence.
Page 159	“He said it was something that he wanted to do since he was little.”	This shows that he has had a passion to do his Alaskan journey for a long time.
Chapter 17
Page 182	“He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying ‘that mattered’.”	This really shows how well disciplined he was towards himself.
Page 183	“These entries are almost entirely about what Chris ate.  He wrote about hardly anything except food.”	It seemed that he was proud to be able to live off of the land for a long time.
Chapter 18
Page 189	“EXTREMELY WEAK, FAULT OF POT.SEED.MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP.STARVING.GREAT JEOPARDY.”	This is the condition that Chris was in two days after he finished up a book named Doctor Zhivago.
Page 195	“The problem is that if you’re lean and hungry to begin with, you’re obviously not going to have any glucose and protein to spare; so there’s no ways to flush the toxin from you’re system ….. If McCandless ate a big slug of those seeds while he was already in a semi-starving condition, it would have been a setup for catastrophe.”	A professor had said this about the possible happenings of Chris McCandless death which is starting to seem quite odd towards Krakauer.