The Body out There: The Stakes of Jon Krakauer’s Adventure Narratives

Reading Jon Krakauer is like shouldering your way through tangled undergrowth toward a stone-cold slab where a body cools.

You move carefully; you take your time. You think you’ve been here before: daredevils high on the mountain’s icy face or deep in the Alaskan woods. They hurl themselves against the implacability of nature and are found wanting. Their bodies await you: you already know that. But there’s something more here. Something you sense more than see. You part the branches and look for signs. The writer is out here somewhere: weighing himself against the scale of his task, testing his limits, carving his prose, working his ice ax into the fissures of history. And over there, over that rise, are the readers who have been wounded by his work.

The Implications of Nonfiction

It was as if there was an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real—as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here.

(Into Thin Air 107)

Jon Krakauer’s task is to make these stakes real for his readers. Indeed, we read Krakauer not so much to find out what will happen to his heroes (we already know from the dust jackets of his books that they will die) as to ponder the lessons of their deaths and to breach the veil that normally separates the dead from the undead. Krakauer’s winding narratives draw us toward the bodies in the snow or on the abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness; few readers can resist his invitation to a prolonged gaze at their horror.

Death always sells.

But Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s account of the May 10, 1996, blizzard on Mt. Everest that killed eight climbers, and Into the Wild, his story of the Alaskan death of young adventurer Christopher McCandless, also are remarkable for Krakauer’s almost unprecedented willingness to reveal and to second-guess the reporting methods that make his narratives possible. Certainly few best-selling thrillers have made such capital of their indeterminacy. The author discloses the manner by which conflicting evidence robs his stories of certainty, confesses the mistakes he has made as a reporter, and repeats the angry accusations of survivors who have been hurt by his narratives. It’s as if both he and his subjects are risking it all for a payback that will either spell death or recovery. Krakauer’s work thus grows from a conundrum unique to nonfiction: their power depends on a claim to tell the truth about death, even as their premises trouble the foundation on which truth lies.

These matters penetrate the heart of the nonfictional transaction and are far less typical of standard forms of fiction. The writer of nonfiction—particularly disaster narratives—gains the power and sanctity that a reader might assign to actual lives in exchange for the responsibility of reproducing those lives in text. While a reliable truth standard may be insufficient to build an unwavering distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the experience of reading the invented and the historical tale is anything but identical. Nonfiction is a form of communication that purports to reenact for the reader the play of actual characters and events across time. What counts is not so much whether the events are historically fixed, but that they also are available to and experienced by readers and subjects outside of the written history. Because both the author and her subjects engage in a contest for meaning in narrative drawn from historical experience, an author who makes a claim that her story is “true” is forced to negotiate her role in reconstructing and telling events. Jon Krakauer seems to understand that responsibility. Indeed, Krakauer shatters the false dichotomy that over the past few years too often has typified discussions about nonfiction. His work proves that scrupulous, in-depth reporting and self-probing memoir can join forces to produce compelling historical narrative.

The Reporter as Character

I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my role as a journalist. . . . When they signed up...