"Wild" Blog Entries: Chapters 2 and 3/ Part One

Chapter Two:
   Strayed's main purpose in this chapter is to reveal to the reader why her marriage failed, and how she got to the point where she chose to leave everything behind. She refers to the numerous affairs she has during her marriage with Paul, and the aftermath once he and her friends all left her: "I lay alone on our futon feeling myself almost levitate from pain" (Strayed, 36). The purpose of including this flashback is to make the reader truly feel how much pain she was in at this point in her life. It is not necessarily there to make the reader sympathize with her, but to make the reader understand what she was going through. A few paragraphs later, she describes how "[w]ithin the week, [she] quit [her] waitressing job, loaded up [her] truck, and drove west, traveling the same route [she]'d take exactly one year later on [her] way to hike the Pacific Crest Trail" (Strayed, 36). Strayed includes this to show the reader that all of the flashbacks she had included in this chapter were what led her to begin her journey of self-discovery. The pain she felt and the mistakes she made all led to this final decision to leave behind everything that she knew.

Chapter Three:
   In this chapter, Strayed uses imagery to describe her packing process before actually starting the hike. In pages thirty-nine and forty, she gives an extremely detailed list of every single thing she intended to bring on her hike, from personal items to a tent to a chair and everything in between. It was necessary for her to include this to remind the reader of how big this hike will be. On pages forty-two to forty-four, Strayed gives a detailed retelling of how much she struggled with simply lifting up her backpack, and how heavy it is when she finally is able to get it onto her back. She includes this to foreshadow the struggles she will probably face while on the Pacific Crest Trail, and to foreshadow the progress she will probably make as she gets stronger physically and mentally. The imagery in this chapter is important because it predicts what might happen on the trail in later chapters.

Part One:
   On the first page of the prologue, Strayed includes the Shakespearean quote "The breaking of so great a thing should make /A greater crack", from the play Antony and Cleopatra. In context, this quote is said by Octavius Caesar when he hears the news of Antony's death. He means that the loss of someone so important should have had a bigger impact on the world. Strayed includes this in the prologue before discussing her mother's death because her mother was so important to her, and to her, it doesn't make sense that her death did not cause a huge stir in the world. Her death impacted her so much that it felt as if the whole world was changed, similar to Antony and Cleopatra.