Into Thin Air Blog Post #3

Voice:

    In the book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, the voice has a very serious and factual tone. Little or no humor is put into his writing and it can get boring at times. Although I haven't counted exactly, but I bet a thousand exact dates and times were put into the memoir. It's a great book and Jon Krakauer is truly a great writer, but in order to appeal to a wider audience, I would suggest putting in more of his own voice instead of the standard textbook tone. Krakauer uses words that we don't use in our everyday life very often. We don't speak using such carefully planned out phrases. We often use a sense of humor in our speech, in which Krakauer doesn't do much. You can tell that Krakauer is a very well-educated man who is quite serious. Even if you are trying to write in a nonfictional tone, those who are normally very humorous add a wry tone into their writing without even knowing it. Krakauer also uses literary devices in his writing to show how he vividly remembers the disaster at Mount Everest. They're used especially when he's describing the scenery, and this gives the reader a glimpse into his views.

       "The world beyond the rubber mask was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles." 

    I think that for this type of memory that Krakauer is writing about and expressing to his audience, it is the right approach. It has to be factual because there was too much content he would have missed otherwise. When I write my own memoir, I doubt it would be like that because there really isn't much going on in my life. This leaves more room for humor. If Krakauer had incorporated humor into his writing along with all of the necessary historical facts, the memoir would be the length of the thickest Harry Potter book. Plus, I'm pretty sure that Krakauer was too busy trying to survive to think of any humorous situations :/