The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [144]
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on these texts, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the books’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
Comments on The Call of the Wild
SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS, NEW FORK TIMES
Mr. Jack London, having made us acquainted in his previous stories with the people of the Far Northwest, proceeds in his latest and best book, “The Call of the Wild,” to introduce us to a little lower stratum of the same society—a most fascinating company of dogs, good, bad, and indifferent, of which a huge fellow, St. Bernard and collie crossed, named Buck is the bright particular star.
Unlike most stories of the kind, men and women occupy a very unimportant place in this one, and not much time or trouble is taken by the author in individualizing the few humans who are necessary to carry on the action. Better still, Mr. London’s dogs are not merely people masquerading in canine skins. At least this is true to a far greater extent than has usually been the case even with the best dogs of fiction; and during the delightful hour it takes to read this story one feels that he is really in a world in which dog standards, dog motives, and dog feelings are the subject of analysis, and that Mr. London himself has somehow penetrated a step or two behind the barrier which often seems so slight and transparent between man and “man’s best friend.”
This has perhaps resulted in the depiction by him of less lofty and edifying scenes than have been wont to occupy the pages of dog stories, but if the truth were told those dogs generally bore about the same relation to real dogs that the children in what have come to be called “Sunday school books” bear to real children. Every dog lover is thoroughly convinced that a good dog possesses more real concentrated goodness than any other animal on earth, including his masters, but that goodness never exhibits itself in any except attractive forms. A dog was never known to be “painfully good,” or tiresomely good, for the beautifully simple reason that whenever the accustomed discipline is relaxed he immediately shows signs of those unregenerate impulses which are undoubtedly the spice of all character, and which no amount of civilizing influences can ever entirely eradicate from either man or beast.
Mr. London knows this, and, among all his dogs, there is not one that has any martyrlike propensities, still less one that could make any claim to perfection. Yet all, except a villain of a Spitz, win the reader’s affection, for one reason or another, as no angel of a lapdog ever did. Mr. London is not writing about highly civilized dogs, but about the half wild creatures that were used, when the gold digging began in the Klondike, to carry mails and merchandize from the seacoast into the interior. On the Pacific Slope in the Fall of 1897 dogs strong of build and thick of fur were much desired, scarce and high in price, and that was how Buck, who had been living a life of luxurious ease at Judge Miller’s ranch in the Santa Clara Valley, happened suddenly to find himself on the way to Dyea, treacherously sold by his friend, Manuel, the under-gardener, to a dog agent, and later one of a train of sledge dogs, carrying mail to Dawson.