Essays on Call of The Wild

1903, by Jack London

Adventure fiction

The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.

The major theme of the novel is adaptability and survival. Other themes include the power of Instinct, loyalty, power, companionship, the joy of labor, and the virtue of humanity.

Buck, Spitz, Dave, Curly, Billee, Dolly, Joe, Sol-leks, Pike, Dub, Teek and Koona, Skeet and Nig, The Wild Brother, Judge Miller, Manuel, Perrault

In 1897 Jack London went to the Klondike by way of Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. In Alaska, London found the material that inspired him to write The Call of the Wild.

When it was published in 1903, The Call of the Wild was an immediate success.Though it has been and is still, at times, classified as a children’s book, its themes and overarching narrative are suited for mature readers. The novel was banned in 1929 in Italy and Yugoslavia, supposedly because of London’s openly socialist views. In 1933 it was burned by the Nazi Party for similar reasons. The 1935 film The Call of the Wild, directed by William Wellman and starring Clark Gable, focuses solely on John Thornton and Buck, while a 1972 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston, stays truer to the plot of the novel.

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”