Notes on The Call of the Wild by Jack London
What would you do if you were taken from your favorite place and thrown into an environment where everything wants to kill you? Where nothing you know is of any use? Where mercy is a foreign word?
These and many other existential questions are central to Jack London’s immortal novel The Call of the Wild. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Gold Rush of 1897, when countless men left their families and homes and headed toward the Klondike region of northern Canada to try their luck. “These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.”
One such dog is Buck, the four-year-old protagonist. He is the son of Elmo, a St. Bernard, and Shep, a Scotch Shepherd. Buck lives happily with Judge Miller and is blissfully unaware of the madness that has taken over the country. He feels like a king, “king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans included.”
But one of the gardener’s helpers has a weakness. He is called Manuel, which means “God is with us,” and, as his name suggests, he is a man of faith. But instead of the faith expected from a devout Christian, he has faith in a gambling system. And because “the wages of a gardener’s helper do not lap over the needs of a wife and numerous progeny,” Manuel sells Buck to “a solitary man” for one hundred dollars.
Buck tries to resist, but to no avail. He is taken away and then passed through a whole host of people: “many hands,” “four men,” “strangers,” a stout man, with a red sweater.” Significantly, none of them is mentioned by name. They are all like cogs in a machine—inhuman and indifferent, doing what they are told to do without any scruples or morals. Their namelessness also parallels Buck’s stage of confusion. He doesn’t understand what is happening to him and who is to blame. The warmth of Judge Miller’s place is no longer to be felt. Everything is cold now—both physically and metaphorically. Nothing in his civilized life has prepared him for this. He is at a complete loss.
Forced by the circumstances, Buck has to adapt. The man in the red sweater teaches him a lesson he never forgets: “a man with a club … [is] a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed.”
This is the first of many times the word master is used in the novel. And rightfully so. After four years of freedom, Buck is turned into a slave within days or weeks. He is introduced to the “Law of Club and Fang” by a man whose sweater is red. Red like blood. A symbol of cruelty, impulsiveness, and death, but also of life, ancestry, and character—all themes pertinent to the story.
Beaten but not broken, Buck is bought by the French Canadians Perrault and François for three hundred dollars. They need dogs to travel north, and Buck recognizes that they are “a new kind of men.” Their names mean “rock” or “stone” and “Frenchman” or “free man,” respectively. This foreshadows the hardness Buck is about to face in the foreign world away from his first owner, whose name and profession symbolize justice and civilization.
Perrault and François earn Buck’s respect, but not his affection. He soon learns that they are “fair men, calm and impartial in administering justice, and too wise in the way of dogs to be fooled by dogs.” Buck sees snow for the first time and learns how to sleep outdoors in the freezing cold. He watches a pack of huskies butcher Curly, a “good-natured” dog also owned by his masters, and understands that “[o]nce down, that was the end of you.” He learns how to steal food and get away with it. His first theft marks him “as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment” and shows “the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.”
Buck gains a lot of knowledge by experience, but also the North awakens “instincts long dead” in him. And everything happens fast: “[h]is development (or retrogression) was rapid.” It has to be this way. There is no time to waste, no time to remain constant, no time to feel safe. He has to keep going, and, to do so, he has to use every last resource. He achieves “an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment.” This economy is imbued into the very fabric of the narrative. There are no superfluous paragraphs, no extraneous explanations, no irrelevant asides. Every word drives the plot forward as though the author is afraid that even a single distraction would be the death of his novel.
Buck quickly learns how to pull a sled and before long decides to supersede the lead dog. His new adversary is aptly named Spitz, which is German for “top,” “sharp,” and “spiky.” Buck wants to be in charge, to dominate. And this is precisely what sets him apart. His newly found ambition gives him a reason to wake up in the morning. It keeps him focused on things he can influence or, to some extent, even control. It keeps him alive. As the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl would write decades later in Man’s Search for Meaning, “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”
The once friendly dog is on its way to becoming a cold-blooded murderer: “[i]t was inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck wanted it. … All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill—all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate.”
When the opportunity arises, Buck does not hesitate. He fights Spitz to the death and emerges victorious. He becomes “the dominant primordial beast who … [has] made his kill and found it good.” And as such, he demands recognition. When Perrault and François try to give the top job to Sol-leks, “the Angry One,” Buck openly rebels, “advertising plainly that when his desire was met, he would come in and be good.” The “masters” are forced to obey.
Buck proves a capable leader and ensures that all dogs leap “as one dog in the traces.” But soon he has to face a new challenge. Perrault and François sell him to a mail train, and he has to reestablish his dominance. This doesn’t take long: “The other dogs … were fivescore and odd. There were fierce fighters among them, but three battles with the fiercest brought Buck to mastery.”
By this time, Buck has grown much wilder, much more savage than he was during his carefree days at the beginning of the novel. But the rules of the civilized world are not applicable in his new environment, and he has no choice but to ignore them. “He must master or be mastered.” He has even become almost content with his new life or at least has learned to accept it: “Sometimes he thought of Judge Miller’s big house … but oftener he remembered the man in the red sweater, the death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz, and the good things he had eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick.”
Buck’s new masters are unnamed. Like the dog traders, who were interested only in making a profit, they are interchangeable parts of a machine. Their function has taken precedence over their human names, and they do what they are supposed to do: work. Unlike the traders, however, they try to make the animals feel more comfortable: “Each night the dogs were attended to first. They ate before the drivers ate, and no man sought his sleeping-robe till he had seen to the feet of the dogs he drove.”
The toil, however, is still gruesome, and the conditions are still unforgiving. One of the dogs—Dave—gets so weak that his driver lets him walk without a harness. But Dave won’t have it: “sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.” The other drivers are not surprised: “[h]is comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces.”
Indeed, this paradoxical behavior is not uncommon among those who manage to endure brutal conditions for extended periods of time. There has to be a reason not to surrender, a reason to keep fighting. For Dave, this reason is the toil, and he pays with his life for it when the drivers shoot him dead to end his suffering.
Things get more and more desperate due to the high volume of letters and parcels that has to be transported. Buck has lost twenty-five pounds in thirty days, and his teammates are not in a better shape. And, “since dogs count for little against dollars,” those too weak for the toil are to be sold.
They are bought “harness and all … for a song” by Charles and Hal, who are traveling together with Mercedes. The new masters are “manifestly out of place” in the North. First, they take too much luggage, then too many dogs for one sled. They overfeed the animals and run out of food. Hal believes that all dogs are lazy and that “you’ve got to whip them to get anything out of them.” Mercedes rides on the sled instead of walking by it. In short, they do virtually nothing right, and most of the dogs die. Even Buck’s desire to lead is shaken. He is “still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.”
Despite the utter incompetence of their masters, the dogs manage to pull the sled to a camp. Barely: “They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. … It was heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red sweater had proved that.”
The camp’s leader—John Thornton—immediately sees the drivers for who they are and calls them fools. Unperturbed, they decide to keep going and order Buck to pull the sled over thin ice. But Buck disobeys: “[H]e sensed disaster close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him. He refused to stir.” Hal starts beating him mercilessly, but he doesn’t move. He is ready to die: “So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.”
At last, John Thornton interferes and saves the poor dog’s life. Thus, Buck gets yet another master.
At John Thornton’s camp, everybody is friendly, even the dogs. It is as though Buck has stumbled upon an oasis of goodness in a desert of brutality. This lack of aggression surprises him even though he has been exposed to exactly that during the first four years of his life. But he is in for an even bigger surprise, one that comes from within—he discovers love for the first time. “Love, genuine passionate love.” Love born out of something as striking as a random act of kindness.
The object of Buck’s affection is no other than John Thornton, who is a rather peculiar man recovering from frozen feet. His first name means “God is gracious,” whereas his surname stands for “thorn-bush settlement.” Indeed, his persona is an amalgamation of opposing qualities, something that only the North can create. He is self-sufficient and unafraid of the wilderness. Though tough on the outside, he hasn’t lost his humaneness or sense of justice. His language is harsh, but his actions can be gentle. Using bad words as terms of endearment comes naturally to him. Like Buck, he has been through too much not to have been affected. “And as Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this feigned bite for a caress.”
Little by little, Buck regains his strength and then some more. His love for John Thornton grows, but so does his wildness: “[E]ach day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. … Thornton alone held him.” Before long, it becomes apparent how far Buck has gone indeed. “‘Black’ Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious,” strikes John Thornton for trying to defend a newcomer in a bar. Without hesitation, Buck kills the offender and feels no remorse: “To show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death.”
Buck does not get punished for his deed. The men around him obey the laws of the North and decide that he had had “sufficient provocation.” But the news of the event spread all over Alaska, and Buck becomes infamous.
Some time later, a rich man called Matthewson wagers a thousand dollars that Buck cannot start a sled with a thousand pounds in it, break it out, and pull it for one hundred yards. “Not a man believed him capable of the feat.” But Buck succeeds. He does so because John Thornton asks him to. He does so because he is in love and because that feeling can be a source of unimaginable strength in extreme situations. It can unlock hidden potentials and enable the body to use every muscle to its full capacity. And Jack London knows that. Not by chance has he titled the chapter with the wager “For the Love of a Man.”
This love, however, is the last remnant of the civilized world left in Buck. When John Thornton and his team go back on the trail, Buck loves every part of the journey: “[t]o Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places.” The goal of the expedition is, of course, to find “a fabled old mine” and get rich. The allure of gold is too strong even for John Thornton, especially when it comes with the added bonus of succeeding “where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed.” And they succeed. The men find what they have risked their lives for, and each day of work earns them “thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets.” But this is not how the story ends.
Before long, Buck begins to wander about for days at a time. He kills a bear and a moose and enjoys it. His ears discern the howls of wolves ever more often, and he even befriends a wolf. Voluntarily. His temper becomes increasingly savage, and he has almost reached the point of no return: “[t]he blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived.”
One day Buck follows a strange scent. It leads him back to the camp only to find it under attack by a group of Yeehats (a native tribe) armed with bows and arrows. Buck goes berserk: “A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head.”
The Yeehats are no match for Buck. He kills them one after the other with ease like “a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy.” But it is too late. John Thornton, his men, and his other dogs are dead, killed by the children of the North and by their own blinding ambition.
This event precipitates Buck’s final transformation. He has “killed man, the noblest game of all.” And with John Thornton gone, he has no reason to resist the howls of wolves inviting him to join them. So he listens. He succumbs to the call of the wild and becomes the leader of a pack of wolves. He is now one of them, a creature of the North, a merciless killing machine looking for its next prey. And there’s no turning back.
So. What is the novel really about?
On one level, it is about an unfortunate dog forced to leave his comfort zone and face an extreme environment. But there’s more than that. Much more.
The Call of the Wild is a novel about survival. About what it takes to survive and what it means to survive. Buck has to adapt, learn, and unlearn rapidly to even stand a chance. He learns from others, but also from himself. The long-forgotten instincts inherited from his ancestors aid him, and he accepts their help. They seem natural to him because they are natural. Having been perfected over countless generations, they will never be fully suppressed by civilization.
In order to survive, Buck has to die. He has to forgo most, if not all, of the rules and customs of the world he knows. He has to change, to metamorphose into something else, to become unrecognizable. And he does it magnificently. No regrets. No remorse. No complaints or accusations. He against the world in a battle that transcends time and species.
It couldn’t be any other way. An organism not interested in its own life is bound to go extinct. We are all survivors. When pushed to the extreme, we can access the remnants of our savage past; the past we’ve worked so hard to bury.
Jack London has chosen the North as an example of an extreme environment because he has been there. He was one of the many men looking for gold in 1897, and his personal experience can be seen in the highly realistic and vivid depictions of the cold and of how it affects everyone. He knows that the North does not forgive. This is why so many good-natured characters die in the novel: Curly is killed by other dogs, Dave is overworked to exhaustion and ends up shot, John Thornton and his team are killed by a native tribe. They defy brutality, and brutality kills them. And yet …
On the face of it, choosing between life and death is not a choice at all. But things are not so simple. There has to be a reason to live, to keep going. Even an illogical or detrimental reason can suffice, but there must be one. And the survivor has to be willing to sacrifice everything, including themselves. Quickly. There are no second chances, and no help is coming.
But why go so far north in the first place? Why not listen to reason and ignore any potentially deadly temptations?
The reasons for leaving the safety of the home and venturing into the unknown and the dangerous are also central to the novel. Whether driven by avarice, ambition, or sheer curiosity, we, humans, have always been explorers and risk-takers. We have been to all seven continents, climbed the highest mountains, and even stepped on the Moon. To paraphrase the British climber George Mallory, we go to places because they are there. Or we die in the attempt. Therefore, events such as the Gold Rush of 1897 are only natural, if illogical. People have gone farther for less and will never stop doing so, especially when money is involved. The popularity of exotic vacations, lotteries, and get-rich-quick schemes proves this.
The novel is also about collateral damage. Machiavelli might believe that the end justifies the means, but Jack London clearly disagrees and exposes the Klondike Gold Rush for what it was: a mad enterprise run by savages and powered by exploited dogs. And such exploitation is not a thing of the past. It can be found in wars, modern-day slavery, and even greedy corporations. The world is still full of masters.
Despite the seemingly inexhaustible scope of his novel, the author has done a great job aiding the reader. The imagery conveys the main ideas very clearly: words associated with suffering, greed, cold, death, learning, speed, change, ancestry, and survival abound in every chapter, including the first one. The fast pace of the narrative communicates a sense of urgency, whereas the high density of the text parallels the extraordinary amount of information that Buck has to assimilate quickly. The name of the protagonist is also well chosen: it means “a robust and spirited young man”; a survivor.
The novel even begins with an epigraph summarizing the entire plot—the first stanza of John O’Hara’s poem “Atavism”:
Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.
The “[o]ld longings” are the age-old desires to explore, to get rich, and to do something new; the “nomadic leap” is the Gold Rush, which necessitates forgoing the usual, or customary, way of life; and the wildness, or “ferine strain,” has to awaken from its winter (“brumal”) sleep. Thus, the metaphorical chains of civilization will be broken. The protagonist will survive, but he will never be the same again. Every action precipitates a reaction; every cause has an effect.
Just like Buck, those who read the novel will also be changed forever. It is impossible not to feel sorry for the wretched animals forced to endure cold, pain, and hunger for weeks on end. They are beaten, torn to pieces, turned into “perambulating skeletons,” and killed or left to die. They are bought and sold like inanimate objects incapable of suffering. They are slaves owned by masters who care only about money. And yet, they keep going. If there is one main takeaway from the novel, it is probably this: survive. Find a reason to live. Don’t give up. Don’t surrender. Wake up in the morning and try to make the world a little bit better. Try to change yourself in a positive way. Think. Think about the world as a whole, not just about your personal interests. Learn to feel empathy. Help those in need and expect nothing in return. And maybe, just maybe, many generations from now, stories like Buck’s will be confined to the realm of fiction.
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