Out Of Thin Air ( Summarizing My Thoughts)

Over the course of my last three blog posts we have been examining Jon Krakauer's “Into Thin Air”, an account of his participation in one of the expeditions that were part of the ill fated 1996 Mount Everest climbing season, a season that saw the deaths of fifteen climbers including many of the author's companions. Having examined the book in sections, one third at a time, each from a different perspectives, it is clear that there are several ways to examine this book and come up with thought worthy ideas.

Examining the first third of book from the perspective of the reader response theory it was interesting to note that the author started from the middle of the story, making it plain from the beginning that this was not intended as a fun adventure tale or the story of triumphant achievement one might expect from an account of reaching the top of the world's tallest mountain, even though the author did in fact accomplish this. It is instead a story of something that went wrong. The reader is instead invited to think, to assess which factors may have contributed to the disaster we know right from the beginning is to come.

Examining the middle third of the book from the perspective of archetypal theory was particularly interesting in this case because the book is a nonfiction account of real events. As such the author did not have the freedom to simply invent characters as he saw fit in order to tell the story he wanted, and therefore he could not simply draw on literary archetypes at will as would the author of a fictional novel. As such it could be said that each character's role is more complicated than might be expected in a work of fiction, being neither as clearly the hero, the mentor or innocent and inexperienced character that might be the case if the story had been made up from out of thin air. Still, we do see aspects of these archetypes in the various participants we meet through the story.

We examined the final section of the book from a postcolonial perspective and this is the approach I found most interesting. Like most expeditions lead by commercial mountaineering teams, the author is part of a group approaching Everest from the Nepalese side. The landscape and the people of Nepal, while present throughout, largely form a backdrop to most of the story. Krakauer, on the one hand, often simply accepts this as a necessary part of telling the stories of the western tourist climbing fanatics, without whom these expeditions wouldn't be taking place to begin with. For example, while he takes great effort to research any westerner involved that years climb, even those climbing from the Tibetan side who he did not encounter, when it comes to the guides he did not personally know Krakauer found it sufficient to refer to them simply as “ Sherpas” when they came into the story. To his credit however he does take the time to elaborate on the history, and lives of the people who inhabit the land that surrounds Everest, and how their lives are impacted by the way the western imagination has been so captivated by their sacred mountain.