Jeremy's+Essay+prompts

Jeremy Braun EDG 680-Methods Drew Mullen March 2009

Prompts for //Into the Wild//:

Directions: Write a 3 page well-organized thesis-support essay that addresses one of the writing prompts below. Please make sure that you actually talk about the prompt given, and that, no matter your position, you back it up with your reasoning and textual evidence.

1.One of the major questions we’ve looked at in //Into the Wild// is why did Chris McCandless leave it all behind, abandon his life as he did and rough it in the Alaskan Wilderness. Many positions are offered in the book, what’s yours?

2. Wanderlust is a major theme in //Into the Wild//. Discuss your conception of wanderlust that you gather from your reading and analyze just how important wanderlust is to Chris McCandless’s character in the novel.

3. Near the middle of the novel, the author notes “my sense of Chris McCandless’s intentions comes, too, from a more personal perspective” (134), and he launches into his own personal history with his father to help explain McCandless’s intentions. What do you make of this connection—do you buy it—and how does it affect your reading of the novel? Does it make McCandless’s narrative more or less credible, why or why not?

4. How you would you describe the character of Chris McCandless in the novel?

5. Literature plays a prominent role in the novel, with literary quotes framing each chapter, and the author cites McCandless’s penchant for Tolstoy, London, Thoreau and others. For this essay, analyze the role literature plays in the novel. What is it doing? And how does offer readers a way of frame to understand Chris McCandless?

Another theme to think about: the rugged individual. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. *Please makes sure all essays are double-spaced, use MLA format, and provide page numbers for all quotes.

The draft of this essay is due Monday, March 16, and the final is due Thursday, March 20th.

[1] As we discussed in class, this is a guideline; I am more concerned with what you have to say than an exact number of words or pages.