Author: eclark2

“Alex hadn’t been around machinery much,” Westerberg says with a shake of his head, “and it was pretty comical to watch him try to get the hang of the clutch and all those levers. He definitely wasn’t what you’d call mechanically minded.” (Krakauer, 62)This is a picture of some old, broken machinery. The reason I chose this image is because it is a piece of machinery, and machinery in this case is a metaphor for the modern world, which is steeped in machinery and technology. McCandless, as described in the caption, was completely lost when it came to things like machinery. This is a metaphor for the way Alex rejected the modern world, burning his money and leaving behind his possessions, in order to be closer to nature. He just wasn’t very good with things like machinery, and given a choice would rather be out canoeing or trekking around Alaska than dealing with things like machinery in the “civilized” world.

Everything had changed suddenly——the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly, than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

This is a picture of a family going home together. The reason I selected this image is because it shows the togetherness of a family—parents holding their children’s hands, everyone being together—and “family” is one of the things that Chris McCandless rejected and wanted to escape from. As for the caption, I had some difficulty selecting this one, as there was a quote from McCandless that seemed to have just as much ironic dissonance with this picture (his quote on page 64), but in the end I feel that this caption better conveys the loneliness of being by oneself. The picture represents the “old familiar, peaceful days” which are now “abolished and gone for good” in the caption; this passage seeks to find some sort of “ultimate purpose,” an “absolute,” that one must find on one’s own. And yet, for some looking at a picture like this, the “ultimate purpose” might in fact be the very thing that one would reject, namely family.

There had been a big thaw in early April, and breakup had come early in 1992, but the weather had turned cold again, so the river’s volume was quite low when McCandless crossed-probably thigh-deep at most—allowing him to splash to the other side without difficulty. He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon. To McCandless’s inesperienced eye, there was nothing to suggest that two months hence, as the glaciers and snowfields at the Teklanika’s headwater thawed in the summer heat, its discharge would multiply nine or ten times in volume, transforming the river into a deep, violent torrent that bore no resemblance to the gentle brook he’d blithely waded across in April. (Krakauer, 63)This is a picture of a river in Alaska. I selected this photo because it seems like it might be deceptive, similar to the river that McCandless crossed. It appears to be shallow enough to cross easily, but it could just as easily be that in a few months once everything thaws it could rise just like the river McCandless crossed. This does indeed appear to be a “gentle brook,” that one could not even imagine becoming a “violent torrent,” but just as with the river McCandless crossed, appearances can be deceiving.

Ironically, the wilderness surrounding the bus—the patch of overgrown country where McCandless was determined “to become lost in the wild”—scarcely qualifies as wilderness by Alaska standards. … Just sixteen miles to the south, beyond an escarpment of the Outer Range, hundreds of tourists rumble daily into Denali Park over a road patrolled by the National Park Service. (Krakauer, 165)This is a picture of the Denali Park road. I selected this photo because it is a picture of a place that was so close to where McCandless was, only sixteen miles away according to the caption. Ironically, although McCandless believed himself to be far away from civilization, it was much closer than he realized. And if he had realized it, he might have been able to make it out of the Alaskan wilderness alive.

SynthesisBoth the photos and captions have a great influence on one another. The photo can have great influence on the meaning of the caption, and also on Into the Wild itself, by showing a visual related to that. In the fourth image here of the Denali Park road, actually seeing the road mentioned in the caption makes it seem even more real, and gives a feeling of just how close civilization was, even as we can clearly see the juxtaposition of civilization and wilderness in the photo itself. Captions also have great influence on the photos—just seeing a picture of a river, as in the third image above, doesn’t seem that important. But when given the weight of the caption—that such a gentle-looking stream could turn into a violent torrent of water—makes us look at the picture in a different way and wonder if such a transformation is really possible, and if so what would that look like in comparison to the current picture?

All in all, the photos and captions work together to enhance each other, and also to enhance the meaning of Into the Wild. I think that Into the Wild might have benefited from including more of the pictures that McCandless took of himself and the places he visited. Although Krakauer’s descriptions are very specific and spot-on, being able to actually see something with your own eyes has a different effect than just reading about it, just the same way as seeing a picture of the mountains in Alaska with your own eyes, or actually visiting the place, is a far different experience from reading a description of it on the page. It is the same with these photos and captions; the photos bring the captions to life, and the captions give meaning to the photos. Together, they provide much more food for thought than either could alone.

The article on deconstruction in “The Dead” really sparked my interest, especially with the ideas of repetition and chiasmus. I hadn’t noticed all the little details of wording before, so it was good to go back and see all these passages that related to one another in ways I hadn’t previously thought of.

One thing this article made me think about in particular was how the beginning and the ending of the story relate to each other. “The Dead” is both the title of the story as well as the final line, so in a way the story ends in the same place that it started. Furthermore, from the beginning until the end, outwardly nothing has changed. The party went on as it always does, and afterwards everything returns to the way it was before. The only change is on the inside, because Gabriel now knows about Michael Furey, which he didn’t before. Also, Gabriel is a character that is “presented as literally alive in the story but who can be said to be figuratively dead” (223). Thus, his being figuratively dead yet literally alive at the end of the story also relates back to the beginning, where “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” (21), in which case the terms “literally” and “figuratively” seemed to be interchanged to add emphasis to the phrase—the same way one might say that Gabriel is “literally” dead in some way, to emphasize his figurative death.

If this is really the case, and the end of “The Dead” is circular and brings us right back to the beginning, then what exactly could we say has happened? Has Gabriel, or any of the characters, evolved or changed in some way, or are they all exactly the same as they were before the party, the same as they were before last year’s party, and the one before that, and the very first one thirty years ago? As is the case with deconstruction, the text can support both views. Gabriel’s character, from beginning to end, makes everything about himself, even something that has nothing to do with him, such as in this statement towards the end: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (59). Thus, even at the end, we could say that he hadn’t really changed at all from the beginning. However, in the same paragraph there is also evidence that his attitude might be changing: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world” (59). Is this really Gabriel seeing beyond his own identity, or is it merely him once again applying his identity to everything that is outside himself?

The final sentence, also, can be used as evidence for both cases. Gabriel himself and the universe—and everyone else in that universe, living and dead—are juxtaposed in the very last line, so either interpretation—or perhaps both—could well be right. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (59).

One thing that puzzled me at first about Archibald MacLeish’s poem Ars Poetica is all the qualities that MacLeish thinks that poetry should have, or in some cases, should not have. He says that poems should be “mute,” “dumb,” “silent,” and “wordless.” These attributes seem to be the opposite of what many people would want a poem to be—we want poems to say something, to mean something, to be filled with nuances that require multiple readings to fully figure out (if one is ever able to fully figure it out at all).

Ars Poetica, however, also seems to follow its own expressed ideas of what poetry should be. The first line, “A poem should be palpable and mute,” seems to suggest that instead of explicitly expressing an opinion or meaning, a poem should try to paint a picture with words that is open to interpretation by the reader—thus causing the poem itself to be seen as “dumb,” “silent,” and “wordless.” The poem itself does this with vivid imagery filled with tangible visual details such as the lines “An empty doorway and a maple leaf,” and “Leaving, the moon releases/Twig by twig the night entangled trees,” which both bring to mind a picture of what each scene looks like.

Another detail that caught my eye was the repetition of the stanza “A poem should be motionless in time/As the moon climbs.” Sandwiched in between the repetition of these lines are two stanzas detailing the movement of the moon in the sky. This creates the sensation that, within the world of the poem, the moon is climbing yet the poem remains motionless, just as the line states.

At first, this poem had me very confused—I thought to myself, “But what does it mean?!” And then, upon further reflection, I realized that I was looking at it in the wrong way. The whole point of the poem seems to be that the question of meaning is irrelevant—the poem is there, open to interpretation by the reader. As Ars Poetica concludes in the final stanza,

“A poem should not mean
But be.”