Into the Wild: Chapter 14–Epilogue

by Jon Krakauer
Nonfiction writer Jon Krakauer retraces the steps of Christopher McCandless, a young man who gave up his material possessions and met a tragic end in the wilds of Alaska.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Chapters 1–7, Chapters 8–13, Chapter 14–Epilogue

Here is a link to our lists for Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. carapace
    hard outer covering or case of certain organisms
    Vast and labyrinthine, the ice cap rides the spine of the Boundary Ranges like a carapace, from which the long blue tongues of numerous glaciers inch down toward the sea under the weight of the ages.
  2. phantasmagoria
    a constantly changing medley of real or imagined images
    Here the glacier spills abruptly over the edge of a high plateau, dropping seaward through a gap between two mountains in a phantasmagoria of shattered ice.
  3. madrigal
    an unaccompanied partsong for several voices
    A madrigal of creaks and sharp reports — the sort of protest a large fir limb makes when it’s slowly bent to the breaking point — served as a reminder that it is the nature of glaciers to move.
  4. chutzpah
    unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity
    In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.
  5. factitious
    not produced by natural forces; artificial or fake
    I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man.
  6. ambivalent
    uncertain or unable to decide about what course to follow
    Although McCandless was enough of a realist to know that hunting game was an unavoidable component of living off the land, he had always been ambivalent about killing animals.
  7. naivete
    lack of sophistication or worldliness
    But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he’d consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.
  8. adamantly
    inflexibly; unshakably
    He seemed to have moved beyond his need to assert so adamantly his autonomy, his need to separate himself from his parents.
  9. idiosyncratic
    peculiar to the individual
    But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map.
  10. unequivocally
    in an unambiguous manner
    When I’d questioned Gordon Samel and Ken Thompson shortly after they’d discovered McCandless’s body, both men insisted —adamantly and unequivocally — that the big skeleton was the remains of a caribou, and they derided the greenhorn’s ignorance in mistaking the animal he killed for a moose.
  11. resilience
    the ability to recover readily from adversity or change
    He was green, and he overestimated his resilience, but he was sufficiently skilled to last for sixteen weeks on little more than his wits and ten pounds of rice.
  12. disquietude
    feelings of anxiety that make you tense and irritable
    The disquietude he felt on Katahdin’s granite heights inspired some of his most powerful writing and profoundly colored the way he thought thereafter about the earth in its coarse, undomesticated state.
  13. feckless
    generally incompetent and ineffectual
    McCandless wasn’t some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair.
  14. incapacitated
    lacking in or deprived of strength or power
    In order for McCandless to have been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many pounds of them; and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato seeds, if he carried any at all.
  15. conundrum
    a difficult problem
    Over a period of several years I doggedly sifted through the scientific literature, hoping to find a clue that would explain this conundrum.
Created on Mon Oct 06 21:32:51 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Jul 07 12:08:36 EDT 2025)

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