Into the Wild By Jon Krakauer

Krakauer’s Into the Wild is a story about human adventure and experience in nature. Some of the main themes point to a desire to be self-reliant, the unpredictability of nature, and the difficulty in escaping family problems. This story reflects how impossible it is to actually run away from your problems no matter how badly you wish to escape from them. The elements of nature in this story show that life brings unexpected twists and turns to our lives. This story is formatted in a unique way in that the author acts as the narrator and even inserts himself into the story as a character from time to time. This unique reading experience adds layers to this story that students might not be used to and engage their thinking.

While I found this story to be interesting I am not sure how I feel about using it as a teaching tool. While there are unique literary elements that would be interesting to show students, it does not offer as wide of a range of teaching strategies as I would like to see from a book. The themes in this story are relatively basic in terms of literary analysis and I would much rather use a book that has a deeper layer of themes along with the ones mentioned so plainly in this book. I know that students get overwhelmed with the amount of reading they are expected to do and it either stresses them out or they don’t actually do the reading and I want to try to limit the number of texts I use and utilize them longer rather than do a significant amount of reading and cover the same number of topics. However, I think that this book would be an interesting one to recommend to students who have a desire to do more reading outside of our actual class assignments.