Into Thin Air: The Ordeal

Question: How was the fact the book Into Thin Air had a long ordeal significant to the plot of the story?

After reading a little bit of Roald Dahl with my siblings and basing my last few posts on some of his works, I've decided to return to blogging about Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer because the book displayed more aspects of the archetypal journey than Roald Dahl's The BFG or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory did.

Answer: The long ordeal in the book Into Thin Air was significant to the plot because it created tension in the plot, caused the reader to become interested in the story and developed the many main characters on the mountain.

First of all, the long ordeal caused definite tension in the plot. After Jon crossed the threshold by finally committing to Outside Magazine's offer to have him climb to mountain and write an article about his experiences, he jumped on a plane to travel to Kathmandu. Here, he met his mentor Rob Hall, the guide of Krakauer's Adventure Consultants climbing group and began learning his way around the Special World through numerous tests, enemies and allies. Some of these tests were difficult acclimatization climbs up and down the mountain to adjust to the high altitudes found on the mountain. Then, after many weeks of these climbs and numerous conflicts and complications, the expedition's assault of the summit began as well as the story's ordeal.

Due to this climb begin so long and filled with details, the ordeal became very long. This resulted in the reader feeling like they were on the mountain and travelling with the mountaineers every step of the way. However, as the life changing storm began to roll in and numerous awful events occurred like Andy Harris falling off of the mountain due to the blizzard and many climbers freezing to death, tension began to build as we followed every climber's struggle to survive on the world's tallest mountain.

Every little event that happened during this storm, the deadliest in Everest history, caused another larger event to happen and the reader to become more intrigued in the story. Therefore, due to the length of the ordeal, the reader became more and more interested in the plot as they felt they were in the shoes of each climber, began wondering what will happen next to each character and thinking about what they would do in each climber's situation. All of this thought and interest in the plot by the reader resulted in the story to be better understood and caused the book to become impossible to put down.

The length of this book's ordeal also caused the development of the story's character to occur. Since the book was written by Jon Krakauer himself, I got to see him evolve from a confident, well-trained and experienced mountaineer at the beginning of the story to a tired, suffering and unmotivated one during the ordeal as he attempted to find Camp Four, the place Rob Hall's expedition was to return to after their assault of the summit from the South Col. This transformation displayed a whole new side of Jon that we hadn't seen so far in the book while showing the power of nature and what it can do to man.

In the end, the long ordeal and its significance to the story resulted in an exciting plot line filled with twists and turns that caused tension in the story, an intrigued reader as they travel with each climber (but many Jon) and feel their highs and lows over the course of the ordeal and the development of each character as they displayed many different character traits and feelings due to the awful situation they were in.