Monster Symbol Analysis

Cheryl’s backpack, which she nicknames Monster, is one of Wild’s central symbols. When Cheryl first packs Monster, she stuffs it to the gills with everything she thinks she could possibly need to survive a summer on the Pacific Crest Trail—but once it’s full, she struggles beneath its weight and curses the burden it creates for her with every step. Monster is a symbol of all the emotional baggage Cheryl is bringing with her to the PCT: the pain of losing her mother, the destabilization of her brief addiction to heroin, the shame of her broken marriage to her ex-husband Paul, and the serial cheating that destroyed it. As Cheryl makes her way along the PCT, however, she begins to literally—and metaphorically—lighten her load. She receives help from a hiker named Albert, who winnows Cheryl’s excessive possessions when she’s stopped at Kennedy Meadows, and after that, Monster becomes physically lighter. The things she sees and the people she meets along the trail lessen her baggage in other ways, too: as Cheryl gets deeper and deeper into her journey, she begins to have new revelations about her suffering, her choices, and, most poignantly, her resilience in the face of so much pain. Soon, Monster is still a burden to bear each day—but also an extension of Cheryl herself, a friendly, almost animate object that has shaped her body and been shaped by her in return. Monster symbolizes Cheryl’s slow but certain adjustment to the “baggage” she has accumulated throughout her life. Just as hiking the PCT gets easier—but remains far from something that could be categorized as “easy”—shouldering Monster becomes less and less painful and laborious, even as it remains a task that threatens to topple Cheryl each day.