Into Thin Air showed all the different ways of dealing with pain in bad circumstances. It demonstrated denial, anger, minimizing, rationalizing, and repression as ways of dealing with bad circumstances. However, there were no somatic tendencies portrayed throughout the book. These are used by the same and different people through out the book. Some are used by almost everybody involved with the circumstances. Jon Krakauer generally showed most of these because he was the one telling the story, but the people he displayed how other people were feeling through what he saw and interpreted.
The first thing demonstrated is denial. This is demonstrated when Jon's wife Lynda calls him in Chapter 6. "("I'm not going to get killed,"" I answered. "Don't be melodramatic-)- (Pg. 110) Jon is telling is wife that she should not worry about anything because he doesn't even believe there is a chance for him to die. He isn't coming to the full realization that there is actually a good chance to die and he has no clue what is actually in store for him. While talking to his wife, Jon plays it off as though it was just another harmless mountain and there isn't anything to dangerous about it. .
Denial was shown again in chapter 8. This was shown by the first two bodies that the people walked by. "Few of the climbers trudging by had given either corpse more than a passing glance. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren't real "as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here."" (Pg. 139) At this part the climbers were finally realizing what they were risking by attempting to climb this mountain but didn't want to let this sink into their heads. They were trying to play it off as if nothing happened and that there was nobody dead. All of them were in some sort of denial. .
At the same part as the climbers being in denial about the climbers, Jon is also in a state of repression and minimizing.
