TOW #4: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (written, IRB)

Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air is about the author and his team’s expedition to reach the peak of Mount Everest. In contrast to the readers’ anticipations of typical glory and fame that comes with reaching the summit of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air depicts the catastrophe and the everlasting impact that the horrifying events, especially the Mount Everest disaster had on Krakauer and his teammates. Krakauer, feeling partly responsible for the death of his friends wrote this book to tell the world about the tragedy and deaths of his brave fellow climbers, so their courage would be unforgotten. After returning from Mount Everest and writing about their journey for a magazine Outside, Krakauer realizes that he had made a mistake while describing about the death of one of his fellow climbers. This mistake propelled Krakauer to write Into Thin Air to accurately deliver the information and therefore consoling the families of the victims who had been affected by his inaccurate reports for Outside. Krakauer also raises awareness of the dangers involved with Mount Everest and climbing with lack of knowledge and competence by mentioning the Taiwanese and South African teams he had encountered. Krakauer establishes his ethos by writing about his own experience as an expert mountaineer and renowned author. He also admits his past blunder of inaccurately reporting the incident of one of his fellow climbers and ensures the readers that to avoid his own perceptions, which were likely to be distorted by shock and exhaustion, he interviewed his teammates to reach a consensus of what actually had happened. Other than ethos, Krakauer also uses understatement when describing deaths of others. While acclimatizing, Krakauer comes across two dead bodies consecutively. Instead of describing the terrible conditions the bodies were in, he simply states “I came upon another body in the snow” (111). He explains his understatement of death by claiming that there was an unspoken agreement to pretend that the bodies were not real to keep the high morale among the team. Krakauer states, “The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours; the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately” (111). This describes the callousness among teammates as they grow increasingly exhausted and dubious.