PLOT

In the spring of 1990, Christopher McCandless obtain his undergraduate degree with high honors from Emory University. After the ceremony he goes to lunch with his parents and his sister, with which he is very fond of. During the meal the parents give to him a gift: a new car, to replace his old one, but Christopher refuses the present asserting that his old car works perfectly fine. After that meeting, McCandless rejects his conventional life and destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donating nearly all of his savings to a charitable organisation.

He doesn’t want to live in the capitalist and consumer society, so he decides to leave the city and travel across the United States and the North Mexico, using the pseudonym of Alexander Supertramp. His apprehension was caused by a lot of factors, but the most relevant are his difficult relationship with his parents and his passion for the nonconformist writers like Thoreau and London.
His dream is to reach Alaska and during this trip he meets a lot of different people:
- Jan and Rainey, a hippie couple who takes care of him like a son
- Wayne Westerberg, a young thresher from South Dakota
- Tracy, a young hippie songwriter which falls in love with him
- Ron, an old bad-tempered veteran which lives in the past, but grows fond of him
All these characters assume an important role in the life of the young man, they helped him with his trip and gave him advice and important rudiments about Alaska. But at the same time he changed their lives with his positive thinking, giving them important messages of freedom and love.

In April 1922  Christopher reaches Alaska, where he finds wild and uncontaminated nature, which makes him feel full of happiness and peace. He also finds an abandoned bus, which he calls “The Magic Bus”, and it becomes his home.
At first McCandless is happy with the isolation and the beauty of nature around him, so he spends his days reading books and writing his diary about his personal thoughts and notes. He also hunts animals and collects berries and other edible plants.

Four months later Christopher’s life becomes harder, and when the winter comes all the animals go away, so he could only eat roots, plants and berries. Unfortunately he confuses similar plants and eats a poisonous one, falling sick as a result. Slowly dying he continues to document his thoughts and just before dying he writes on his diary this phrase: “Happiness is only real when shared”.

Two weeks later, his body is found by moose hunters. Shortly afterwards, his sister returns to Virginia with her brother’s ashes in her backpack.