IRP Post 5 - Cited Passage

"I was stunned. For two months I'd been telling people that Harris had walked off the edge of the South Col to his death, when he hadn't done that at all. My error had greatly and unnecessarily compounded the pain of Fiona McPherson; Andy's parents, Ron and Mary Harris; his brother, David Harris; and his many friends." (pg. 288).

To me, this one passage sums up the whole Mt. Everest experience. There was just a lot of mistakes, simple as that. Mistakes on the way up, the decent, and even the after math of the disaster. People were misremembered and thought to be someone else. It was just one big mess that seemed like it would never play out the right way. This brings up the theme of guilt to me. Krakauer felt guilty because of everyone he had hurt telling people the wrong, misinformed story about what really happened that one dreadful day. He had thought his friend Andy had fell off the cliff when he had been thinking of Martin Adams the whole time, who was fine. This misunderstanding just goes to show how something so simple can effect so many other people's lives and branch out quickly. This idea leads off of those in previous posts.