What happens in Chapter 9 of Into the Wild?
Chapter 9 of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild shifts focus from Chris McCandless to delve into the life and mysterious disappearance of Everett Ruess, a young artist and wanderer who vanished in the Utah canyon country of Davis Gulch in 1934 at just twenty years old. Krakauer follows Ruess's adventurous years across the American Southwest and California, where he sold woodblock prints, wrote passionately to family and friends, and took on various aliases—most notably "Nemo." In November 1934, Ruess entered Davis Gulch in the Escalante region and was never seen again. His two burros were discovered in a canyon corral, with the name "NEMO" carved into a doorway of an Anasazi ruin. Search parties found no body or clear explanation for his disappearance. Krakauer explores the different theories surrounding his fate—murder by local cattlemen, accidental death, or intentional self-erasure—while quoting extensively from Ruess's letters, which brim with the same romantic yearning for intense experiences that characterized McCandless. The chapter concludes without answers, leaving the mystery of Davis Gulch unresolved, paralleling the lingering questions about McCandless's last weeks in Alaska.
Analysis
Krakauer's decision to dedicate an entire chapter to Everett Ruess stands out as the book's clearest example of literary triangulation. By juxtaposing Ruess with McCandless, Krakauer encourages readers to explore a thesis: a specific vein of American romanticism—young, male, literate, and profoundly earnest—recurs through the ages. This comparison is intentional, not merely ornamental. Both men shed their original identities (Ruess adopts "Nemo," while McCandless takes on "Alexander Supertramp"), both write with a heightened sense of self-awareness, and both vanish into landscapes that consume both evidence and bodies.
The tone of this chapter contrasts sharply with the rest of the book. While Krakauer's writing typically has a journalistic pace, here it shifts into something akin to an elegy. The canyon country emerges as a character—ancient, indifferent, and beautiful—and Ruess's woodblock prints are referenced as artifacts that endure beyond their creator, reflecting on art as the lasting imprint a wanderer leaves behind.
Krakauer also uses ambiguity as a deliberate technique. He avoids making a definitive judgment on the theories surrounding Ruess's fate, and this choice carries thematic weight: it keeps the notion alive that disappearance can be a choice, that the wild does not always take—sometimes it is willingly given. This notion lingers on every page that follows about McCandless. The carved "NEMO" serves as a found poem, with a single word acting as an epitaph, and Krakauer dwells on it long enough for readers to sense its significance without needing explicit explanation.
Key quotes from Chapter 9
“I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me.”
Ruess writes this in a letter to his brother Waldo, articulating the compulsion that Krakauer frames as the emotional core shared between Ruess and McCandless.
“When I go, I leave no trace.”
Attributed to Ruess in correspondence, this line takes on grim retrospective irony given his disappearance—and echoes McCandless's own deliberate shedding of identity and possessions.
“It is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.”
Drawn from Ruess's letters during his Southwest wanderings, the line exemplifies the aesthetic self-sufficiency Krakauer identifies as both the gift and the danger of the romantic temperament.
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