Into the Wild Lesson Plan

Is McCandless a pale 20th-century burlesque of the protagonist in Jack London's To Build a Fire, as one angered writer asserts in a letter excerpted at the beginning of ch. 8?

Not from Krakauer's point of view. In the Author's Note, Krakauer suggests that were it not for a few seemingly insignificant blunders, McCandless would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 alive. Even though McCandless perished, he's arguably more than just some pale imitation of a romantic ideal, because he followed through on his beliefs and actually walked into the wild. Furthermore, he has some ideas that London's protagonist does not. For instance, his distaste for material goods, his...