Chris McCandless MBTI: ISFP
Reread Into The Wild and felt the need to analyze Chris’s type. Basically just a compilation of quotes from the book and what function I think they display.
Italics are Chris’s own words, otherwise it’s what has been said about him.
Fi:
[after being asked if he had a hunting license] “Hell no. How I feed myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules.”
“He always wore shoes without socks- he just plain couldn’t stand to wear socks. But McDonald’s has a rule that employees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times. That means shoes and socks. Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang!- the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off. I mean the very first thing. Kind of like a statement, to let us know we didn’t own him, I guess.”
“Didn’t like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes- know what I’m saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t know what it was.”
“McCandless explained that he’d grown tired of the ‘plastic people’ he worked with.”
“Burres also got McCandless to accept some long underwear and other warm clothing she thought he’d need in Alaska. ‘He eventually took it to shut me up,’ she laughs, ‘but the day after he left, I found most of it in the van. He’d pulled it out of his pack when we weren’t looking and hid it under the seat.’”
“Chris thought it was a stupid rule and decided to ignore it.”
“Chris had so much natural talent, but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind.”
“..he could be really hard on himself. And he wouldn’t want to talk about it. If I tried to console him, he’d act annoyed and brush me off. He internalized the disappointment. He’d go off alone somewhere and beat himself up.”
“When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning ‘twentieth century inventions’, more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.”
“Chris just didn’t like being told what to do. I think he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole idea of parents.”
“He did not confront his parents with what he knew, then or ever. He chose instead to make a secret of his dark knowledge and express his rage obliquely, in silence and sullen withdrawal.”
“All true meaning resides in in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.”
Se:
“So I explained that trees don’t grow real big in that part of the state, that a bear could knock down one of them skinny little black spruce without even trying. But he wouldn’t give an inch. He had an answer for everything I threw at him.”
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal.”
“The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.”
“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.”
“He also turned the tables and started lecturing the grandfatherly figure about the shortcomings of his sedentary existence, urging the eighty-year-old to sell most of his belongings, move out of the apartment, and live on the road.”
“He interrogated me at gunpoint, then growled, ‘If I ever see you around this train again, I’ll kill ya! Hit the road!’ What a lunatic! I got the last laugh when I caught the same train 5 minutes later and rode it all the way to Oakland.”
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
“Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.”
“Chris was fearless even when he was little. He didn’t think the odds applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge.”
“Nuance, strategy, and anything beyond the rudimentaries of technique were wasted on Chris. The only way he cared to tackle a challenge was head-on, right now, applying the full brunt of his extraordinary energy. And he was often frustrated as a consequence.”
“Chris didn’t like going through channels, working within the system, waiting his turn. He’d say ‘Come on Eric, we can raise enough money to go to South Africa on our own, right now. It’s just a matter of deciding to do it.’”
“If you attempted to talk him out of something, he wouldn’t argue. He’d just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted.”
Ni:
“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were so bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
“Everything I said, he’d demand to know more about what I meant, about why I thought this way or that. He was hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs.”
“He’d tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best.”
“You weren’t supposed to think about heavy-duty stuff in high school. But I did, and he did, too, which is why we hit it off. We’d hang out during snack break at his locker and talk about life, the state of the world, serious things. I’m black, and I could never figure out why everyone made such a big deal about race. Chris would talk to me about that kind of thing. He understood. He was always questioning stuff in the same way.”
“He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, ‘that mattered.’ He possessed grand- some would say grandiose- spiritual ambitions.”
Te:
“If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.”
“McCandless’s face would darken with anger and he’d fulminate about his parents or politicians or the endemic idiocy of mainstream American life.”
“..relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.”
“Chris submitted to Walt’s authority through high school and college to a surprising degree, but the boy raged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he perceived to be his father’s moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parent’s lifestyle, the tyranny of their conditional love.”
“You couldn’t argue with him. He’d come back with something like ‘Oh, so I guess you just don’t care about right and wrong.’”
“Chris didn’t understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry, especially in this country. He would rave about that kind of thing for hours.”
“He tended to see things in black and white. He measured himself and those around him by an impossibly rigorous moral code.”
