Reading and writing in a way set Chris free, taking him away from all the cheaters and betrayers in this world. There was no hope for him here and according to René Descartes there maybe was no hope for any unhappy man. In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes too separates himself from society like McCandless. .
"When Descartes reached that point in his life when he felt that nothing he had been told in the past could be trusted, he too, sealed himself from the rest of society and contemplated the dark possibility that he might be doomed to live out the rest of his days in a dream world." – The Dark Night of the Soul, Richard E. Miller. Nonetheless, this is how some people view life their life on earth. A disadvantage to most but to René it was an opportunity to "rid himself of all that false opinions that he had been fed in his youth", being able to find his own purpose and listen to his thoughts (Miller 433). No longer will lies and other people's beliefs be allowed to fall upon his path unlike Mary Karr whose family's second nature is dishonesty. Karr is having to patch together on her own the night her mother got arrested only given bits and pieces of anything but the truth from her loved ones. She has to come to the realization that her family is The Liar's Club, "a group of men who drink together and tell tall tales that keep their pasts shrouded by darkness", but instead of their pasts its Karr's. The lies of her family aren't the ones who drove her to write The Liar's Club, it was her mother's, Charlie Marie Karr (Miller 439). "I never knew despair could lie", this despair is Charlie Marie, the pain she felt from the disappearance of her first husband and two children drove her to lie about her past, assuming if she lies people would like her (Miller 436). Her dishonesty only made Mary even more thirsty about her mother's skeletons, drifting out to find the truth in her family tree.
