Though it is not explicitly stated, what is the central claim of this passage?

London includes a quote about john thornton as he is observing hal attempt to motivate the exhausted dogs "it was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly". if the word "idle" is defined as "of no real worth, importance, or significance", what does this statement mean with regard to hal? who is the fool? what is hal's folly? why would john thornton think it of no real worth or useless to intervene?

Do you think that the american culture has defined what “normal” is and so our perception of chris mccandless is skewed based on that?

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant