Study Guide to Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London

Intelligent Education

• Éditeur: Influence Publishers
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422372
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Study Aids
• Sous-sujet: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Jack London, an influential writer of the Industrial Revolution. Titles in this study guide include Call of the Wild and White Fang.As works of adventure fiction, London's novels touched on important philosophical themes concerning the political climate in the author's day. Moreover, his writing not only portrayed a belief in socialism, but also attempted to explain naturalism as a philosophical theory. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of London's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

CALL OF THE WILD AND WHITE FANG

INTRODUCTION TO JACK LONDON

 

BIOGRAPHIC COMMENT

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876. The product of a broken home and a poverty-stricken family, he left school at the age of fourteen to go to work. In those times, this was not an unusual occurrence for an average boy, because then school was not considered the necessity that we think it to be nowadays. However, the things that Jack London did were unusual. While still in his teens, he shipped as an able seaman to Japan and the Siberian coast and also worked with a group of oyster pirates. He took odd jobs in mills and a canning factory, and worked his way across the country with a group of socialists who had planned a march on Washington to protest conditions among the poor. Then he joined the gold-rush. He later went to Japan as a war correspondent in 1904 and to Mexico in 1914. He died at age forty.

LONDON LEGEND

Wound up with the facts of Jack London’s life there is much legend. It is a fact that in 1897, when he was twenty-one-years old, he went to the Klondike with the first rush of gold-seekers. Much fable is mixed up with the stories of what he did there, however. Many people believe that London personally saw and did everything that he wrote about in his adventurous stories. Others doubt that he ever did any of these things himself. Somewhere in between is the truth, although the whole of it will probably never be known. There is no doubt, however, that he did follow the rush into the Klondike, that his experience with boats helped him in crossing the dangerous Whitehorse Rapids, that he did stake a claim, but that a year later he returned home as poor as when he had left.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

Our study of the life of Jack London is further complicated by the novel Martin Eden, which was published in 1909. This book is what is termed an autobiographical novel-that is, based on the actual life of its author-but how much of it is true and how much is false we do not know for sure. It is the fiction author’s privilege to do with truth whatever he thinks necessary for the creation of a good narrative. Also, besides being a novelist, Jack London looked upon himself as something of a social philosopher, and he used this story as a means of showing the effect that his ideas about life had or should have had upon the life of his central character. Martin Eden, therefore, cannot truly be considered as the real Jack London in the things he did or said. He is only the Jack London that the author saw himself as being. This novel, then, should not in every sense be taken as literally true, and should be considered only as a help in the study of the author’s life.

EDUCATION

Though poorly educated, Jack London had a tremendous respect for the value of education. This respect was undoubtedly gained in large measure during the years immediately following his leaving school. After wandering about the country and drifting from job to job, he realized that he was not getting anywhere, and that he was still as poor as ever. Not wanting to take the time to return to high school, he crammed enough knowledge into his head during a three-month period of reading and study so that he was able to pass a special entrance examination for college. He enrolled at the University of California; but, after a few months, the lure of the “gold rush” got him, and he was off to the Klondike in 1897.

WRITING CAREER

When Jack London returned home a year later, he began to put his energy into the task of writing. Success did not come to him immediately. He spent the next years writing stories, begging publishers to accept them, and receiving as little as five dollars for them when they would be accepted. In 1900, the first volume of his collected short stories appeared in a book called The Son of the Wolf. Included in this volume is the famous “Odyssey of the North.” However, The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, which brought fame to the author and which led to his being one of the most financially successful writers of his time. This novel was then followed by The Sea Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), plus numerous short stories and political essays. Before his death in 1916, he had published forty-nine volumes.

SOCIAL BACKGROUND

With Jack London, as with many authors, we can really understand his writings only in the light of his own times. And what was these times? First of all, and most importantly, it was the height of the Industrial Revolution in American society when the barons of industry held free sway. In 1882, for instance, John D. Rockefeller established the Standard Oil Trust, a group of some forty oil companies, and used every cutthroat method to suppress competition. Then, in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, the great steel magnate, used hired thugs to break up a strike among his workers. There was no effective legislation on the side of the laboring man. It would seem that even the federal government was opposed to the Labor Movement, for in 1877, President Hayes, and in 1894, President Cleveland, each sent out Federal troops to quell riots which had arisen during railroad strikes. These were indeed times of economic turmoil.

LONDON’S SOCIALISM

There were other factors which made those restless times. For instance, a great influx of non-English speaking immigrants was flooding the labor market and making it easier for the industrialists to keep salaries and working conditions at whatever low standards they desired. Opposed to these unfair practices of management was the rising wave of socialism which had a statement of doctrine in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and which, under the direction of men like Eugene Debs, was advocating violence and revolution instead of peaceful legislation and order as the means by which the laboring man in the United States should better himself.

Young Jack London, poor himself, as was pointed out before, and forced to go to work at an early age in order to support himself, became an advocate of this violent type of socialism-class warfare, revolution, and the overthrow of the capitalist by the laboring class. He preached it loudly on the street corners, and a little more quietly in his books. On one occasion he allowed himself to be arrested in order to test the legality of an Oakland, California, law; and on more than one occasion he signed his letters “Yours for the Revolution.”

PHILOSOPHY

We have said that Jack London was a socialist in his political thinking. His writings reflect this; but more importantly they also are deliberate attempts to explain the philosophy of naturalism. This is the theory that man’s entire life is controlled by his environment. London was a voracious reader, and one of his favorite authors was Herbert Spencer. Now Spencer is the one perhaps most responsible for spreading the theory of evolution that man is descended from lower forms of life. In The Call of the Wild London traces the steps by which a tame or civilized dog retraces the evolutionary steps until he finds himself in his original primitive state. In White Fang the process is reversed. The half-wolf rises from his wild, primitive state to one of civilization. But Jack London’s was an undisciplined mind. He read only what he wanted to read and believed only what he wanted to believe. Even these two books, then, which most critics consider his best, have a certain vagueness about them. Mixed with the naturalism is a romanticism, an escapism which carries the reader away from the reality of his surroundings into the adventuresome wilderness of the Klondike. Also in the naturalism a definite lack of purpose is evident. The reader is forced to ask himself at the end of each of these novels: Is London really serious about wanting us to believe that we have no control over our environment or over our destiny?

THE MAN

Jack London as a man is an enigma. He was the embodiment of the ideal early twentieth-century American-romantic, vigorous, a self-educated success. Also he was an ardent disciple of both socialism and evolution. However, like many of his kind, he was also proud, naive, and indecisive. His voracious reading did not lead him down a road of satisfied contentment. Instead it led him through a wilderness of doubt from which he did not seem able to find the means of escape. He died of uremic poisoning according to the four physicians in attendance at his bedside.

THE CALL OF THE WILD

Anyone who picks up this novel expecting an animal story in the tradition of Black Beauty or My Friend Flicka is in for a disappointment. Told from the point of view of the dog Buck, this story, as other animal stories, contains a great amount of sentimentalism. However, unlike other animal stories, it contains a great amount of brutality, viciousness, and disregard for the value of human life. The dog Buck is the only really important thing in the novel. His survival is what counts. The other dogs, and even the humans in the story, are merely a background against which the story of this survival takes place. They can pass out of the picture without explanation or without reason. For example, at the end of Chapter 5, the ice breaks away under Charles, Hal, and Mercedes, carrying them to their death. None of these people has done anything worthy of this cruel death, unless it be that they were mean to Buck. Moreover, John Thornton expresses sympathy only for Buck and not for the victims of this tragedy.

The law of the “club and the fang” is the predominant element in this novel. Kill or be killed is what drags Buck relentlessly through his adventures until finally he is released from any hold that civilization has upon him. At the conclusion of the story, he is not only with the wolf pack; he is one of them.

The Call of the Wild is not really a novel in the strict sense that we think of Silas Marner or David Copperfield as being novels. Rather it is more like seven distinct short stories, each with its own characters, its own plot and climax. Buck runs though each of them, with each being an episode in the story of his return to the primitive state. Through each chapter relies on the other for continuity, each could almost be read separately and be appreciated for itself. Thus, from this point of view, we have an interesting situation as you will see in our chapter-by-chapter discussion of the work.

CALL OF THE WILD

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTER I

This chapter, entitled “Into the Primitive,” begins with a verse of four lines which introduces the reader to the theme of the novel. Buried within the individual is a ferine strain, a bestial instinct, which has been subdued by the customs of our civilization. This instinct, however, is not dead but sleeping. It is a “brumal sleep,” a winter’s hibernation similar to that of the bear, for instance, whose bestiality is completely subdued during this time. However, the force still exists; and when awakened, it can be seen again in all its natural ferocity.

Comment

As we read this story, we will see a change come over Buck, a change which is gradual but natural. At first he is the big playful dog much like those we have around our own homes. However, as the story progresses, we shall see all this disappear and Buck become a vicious animal.

Buck was born and lived on a huge estate which belonged to Judge Miller and his family. The house was the center of this estate which was covered with lawns and trees, grape arbors, orchards, and berry patches. In a word, it was the elegant home of a wealthy man, a place of luxury and ease.

Comment

If the reader is going to appreciate the contrasts of the story, there are two important facts that he should remember about the short description of the home where Buck spent his early years. The first of these is that the estate is a spacious place where nature exists in a controlled state. Note the author’s simple but exact descriptions, such as interlacing boughs of tall poplars, vine clad cottages, and green pastures. Then the reader should note this second fact. This is not the home of an ordinary, or common, person. It is the home of the unusual person, the rich man.

The next picture that Jack London presents to us in the first chapter of this book is that of Buck as the king of Judge Miller’s estate. Buck’s father was Elmo, a huge St. Bernard which had been the inseparable companion of the Judge; and his mother was Shep, a Scotch shepherd. Also Buck had the run of the grounds, and on them he could do anything or go anywhere that he desired.

Comment

The author’s use of apt expressions and his ability to say much in a few words is seen in this passage. Note the repeated use of the words king and royal. Note also the expression “a sated aristocrat.” The cynicism of Jack London can be seen particularly in the line that tells us that Buck was perhaps even “a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular position.” We have here a picture of Buck that will contrast with the later developments of the story. Buck is now the lord of t...