Fragments, dédoublement, multiplicité : désertification littéraire à l’œuvre dans Into the Wild de Jon Krakauer

Abstract

With Into the Wild (1996), Jon Krakauer reassembles Chris McCandless’s journey into the wilderness through the use of personal letters, literary references, and the testimonies of those who crossed his path. Applying a writing strategy specific to the tenets of literary journalism, Krakauer creates a space for himself as a narrator and fills the gaps in the narrative with his own experience. Although McCandless’s quest reaches its end in Alaska, it is his voluntary exile in the Mojave Desert that marks the turning point in a process of re-creation of the self leading from childhood to manhood. I posit the desert as a space situated at the frontiers of the narrative in the sense that it suspends time and that it is the crack through which the different parts of the story are connected, thus making a whole of the multiplicity of sources and points of view, giving the ghostly traces discovered through the literary investigation a significant coherence.