The father-son relationship, and the potential for dysfunction within it, is an important theme in Into the Wild. Both Krakauer and McCandless are highly ambitious, and have highly ambitious fathers. The problem arises in that their fathers’ ambitions for them are very different from their own, and their strong wills and passion for their own kind of ambition—in Krakauer’s case, mountain climbing, and in McCandless’s, the wilderness and anti-materialist living—cause great rifts between father and son.

For both McCandless and Krakauer, the combination of trying to please a difficult-to-please father, resenting authority, and discovering their fathers’ own great failings leads to an almost insurmountable rift. Krakauer was able to forgive his father only once he was no longer the same man. McCandless died before he had the opportunity to grow out of his anger.