Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell...

People try to understand the world through perception of experiences that they encounter. These encounters include either living through the experience first hand or the experience being conveyed by another person. Our perception weeds out main ideas from those experiences deeming them realistic and if so labels them truths. However, our perception of the obtained truth from those experiences is not always credible because as a recipient we are restricted to the amount of experience we can retain. Meaning the perceptions of the labeled truths is a result of our translation of incomplete experiences into new perception resulting from what he or she could retain from the original experience. Those incomplete experiences give rise to new†¦show more content†¦Due our limitations as recipients, which cause truth to vary among us, discovering truth becomes impossible because of its constant changes. When we encounter experiences through person-to-person, alterations occur at times on purpose by the conveyor on the experience so the translation by the recipient can result in the closest experience to the experience retained by the conveyor. These changes highlight the retained ideas in the experience, allowing it to remain a truth, O’Brien explains, â€Å"when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed†(O’Brien 442). As a recipient of an experience one is bound by only the translation of the experience one can retain, so when the conveyor tells his or her experience/story. The conveyor emphasizes the experience retained causing the alterations in the experience but this allows the recipient to translate a truth similar to the conveyor. Those translations are also seen in Krakauer’s writings, where Krakauer show McCandless was prepare d by translating McCandless’s experiences through McCandless journal entries, â€Å"He was green, and he overestimated his resilience, but he was sufficiently skilled to last for sixteen weeks on his wits†¦he was fully aware when he entered the bush that heShow MoreRelatedDialectical Journal- The Things They Carried and Into the Wild4405 Words   |  18 PagesThey Carried- Tim O’Brien 1) â€Å"They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment† (O’Brien 20). This quote in the first chapter of the book sets the overall tone. The author Tim O’Brien uses