Losing Matt Shepard Analysis free essay sample

Similarly, Jon Krakauer retraces the story of a young man named Chris McCandless who died in the Alaskan wilderness in his piece â€Å"Into the Wild. † The death of a person can become gradually more complex based on if it was natural, accidental or murder, if it was sudden, or slow, or if it was intentional. These are things that are easy to tell people, but make a big difference in the story. When writing or reading about a person’s death there are certain limits one comes across where it becomes very complicated to get the right story across. There is a great deal of limitation in writing about a person’s death because it is challenging to get all the correct details. Communicating the story of someone’s death can be complicated because many people lack the experiences to understand the events one goes through before dying and the true story often gets obscured by a shroud of drivel. We will write a custom essay sample on Losing Matt Shepard Analysis or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The problem in assembling all of the facts and details regarding someone’s death lies in the fact that the only person who truly knows all of them is the person who died. The person who died had the best perspective and knew everything that was going on. No one else knows the pain the deceased was experiencing or what was going through his head. Many questions can arise pertaining to how the person ended up in the situation which led to his death. In Matt Shepard’s case, one might question the story behind his homosexuality. It is hard to actually know what caused him to openly share that he was gay, if he expected harsh harassment for it, or if he regretted it. Only Matt can know the full extent of just how horrible the ordeal was for him. In the case of a murder, however, there is a second party who can be questioned for additional information. The problem is that the culprit is not always willing to tell their story, or they will not tell the truth. Never the less, there is still a second set of information available. For example, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney probably had their own story as to why they chose to assault Matt Shepard. The facts become even more challenging when there are no witnesses or any other party who know what happened. When a person dies alone, there is no one else who knows what went on. Take for example Chris McCandless. He was alone out in the Alaskan wilderness for several months. Nobody knew exactly where he was; let alone what he went through. The closest contact he had was a driver named Gaylord Stuckey who gave him a ride to Fairbanks. He told Stuckey his tentative plans and how he did not even know where he was going. Before saying goodbye, Stuckey â€Å"begged and pleaded with him to call his parents† (Krakauer 346). After that the only form of information there is regarding the events leading up to his death is the journal he was keeping in the back of a book. Where his journal cuts out, nobody can really know what was going on, and this leaves a lot of questions open for discussion. It is impossible to know for certain some of the little things like what his thoughts were, how he had planned for his adventure to turn out, or what ideas he had been contemplating. â€Å"He said it was something he’d wanted to do since he was little,† but one might assume he had not been planning it since he was little (Krakauer 346). Chris was the only person who knew how much thought he had put into his trip or what went on during the gaps in his journal. The rest of society is forced to try and fill in the gaps with what scarce information they have. The most intriguing, and challenging to understand, aspect of a person’s death is his final thoughts. That is one bit of information that is impossible for someone to find out no matter how he researches. A person’s final thoughts are the most complex because they are the accumulation of all of one’s life and decisions. One can only wonder what regrets the deceased came up with or what they might have wanted to do differently. The little details are often the most challenging to gather, and even when they are gathered they can still be difficult to understand. The experiences one goes through in life can be hard for another to understand if they have never been through a similar experience. A challenge arises for writers to try to comprehend what the deceased experienced in life, and then to convey it so their readers can understand it as well. Even if immense description is provided, a reader might still not be able to imagine what a certain experience is like. For example, Matt Shepard was â€Å"viciously and repeatedly [beaten] with a . 357 Magnum† (Loffreda 368). One can try and imagine how painful that would be, but unless it happens to the reader, he cannot know what it is like. Chris McCandless had to make his own fire, catch his food, sleep in the freezing cold, and starve. Most Americans have never had to gather their own wood and build a fire from scratch lighting it with a single match; they are used to just turning on the gas to their fireplace and hitting the ignition switch. Most readers will never know just how great of a struggle that can be. The average person in this country has been hungry after missing breakfast and lunch on a busy day, but most have never had to survive off of eating a squirrel every couple days. Most readers do not have these types of experiences and cannot truly appreciate just how hard it was for him. It is extremely difficult to represent these complex attributes of death. These aspects of death are the most challenging for a writer to convey and a reader to analyze. Without having the particular experience in one’s life to compare the tragedies to, a reader is incapable of grasping the stronger parts of a story. When readers and writers cannot properly interpret the events surrounding someone’s death, aspects of the true story are lost. The less an individual actually knows about an event, the more they have to fill in. Gradually the story becomes diluted, and it eventually loses its initial purpose. The story of someone’s death is like a cup of water. Every time someone embellishes the story with a little something of their own it is like adding a drop of color to the glass. One change does not make a big difference, but if enough people add their own facts or purpose to the original, you end up with something completely different and a cup of dark red water. In Matt’s town or Laramie, reporters hounded the police and Matt’s family for information, and when they did not get it, they made it up, or they warped facts. They ended up completely changing the story into a gruesome scene from a Hitchcock movie. Reporters said he had been â€Å"tied like a scarecrow† and â€Å"strung up in something akin to a crucifixion† (Loffreda 370, 371). Matt’s death also rallied a cause toward protective rights for homosexuals. One young man named Walt Boulden â€Å"was not shy about seizing the attack as a political opportunity, linking the assault to the Wyomong legislature’s failure to pass a hate crimes bill† (Loffreda 371). People from all over gathered, went to Matt’s funeral, and protested Washington for the cause. By the end, all the actions in Laramie no longer were for Matt. People did not care about Matt; they only cared about the cause and being a part of something. One student brought up the interesting point that â€Å"a lot of those people†¦if they had known that Matt was gay while he was alive, would have spit on him. But now it was a cause† (Loffreda 377). Matt’s story had been pushed out of site and lost. In the case of Chris McCandless, it was not so much the media, or a cause that covered the sorrow for his death, but it was the avid Alaskan adventurers who criticized Chris’s methods and actions. They tore apart everything he did during his journey and pointed out every little mistake he made. Many of them blamed Chris entirely for his death saying that he deserved it for going out there so ill-prepared. What many of them did not seem to appreciate was how skilled he was compared to the average person in America. Earlier in his life Chris had in fact â€Å"subsided for more than a month beside the Gulf of California on five pounds of rice and a bounty of fish caught with a cheap rod and reel† (Krakauer 348). Most Americans probably would not have lasted a week in the Alaskan wilderness. Chris managed to survive for several months off of practically nothing. Native Alaskan Roman Dial said himself: I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I’ve never done it. And I’d bet that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off. (Krakauer 364) People got so wrapped up in criticizing him that they lost their sorrow for the fact that it was a tragic, unexpected, accident. The true nature of it being a sad occurrence was lost because of Alaskans scornful criticism. When pondering the death of a person, people often have a great struggle in properly comprehending it. Facts become fiction and comprehension becomes confusion when trying to represent the complexities of a death. Gathering all of the information pertaining to a person’s death can be next to impossible. Many of the facts are only known by the person who died, the people who know something do not always want to chare it, and a lot of false information comes up. It is difficult to understand what the deceased went through unless one has been through it as well. If one has not been through the same experience, he cannot truly understand just how hard it was for the deceased to go through it, and cannot adequately understand their death. The factual nature of the person’s death can be drowned out with lies and made up information. The deceased’s real story becomes just a fragment in a sea of scrap. The real sorrow for a person can be displaced by cruel remarks others or covered over by bewildered calls to action. Understanding and conveying the story of someone’s death is hindered to the point of impossibility by the immense complexities surrounding the person’s death.