The Call of the Wild

“For two days and nights he neither ate nor drank and during those two days and nights of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for whoever first fell foul of him. His eyes turned bloodshot, and he was metamorphosed into a raging fiend. So changed was he that the Judge himself would not have recognized him; and the express messengers breathed with relief when they bundled him off the train at Seattle.”

Buck taps into a ferocious side of himself quickly after being stolen from the Judge’s property. His behavior while in his cage reveals a darker side of him to the reader, making him a more complex character. This early in the story, Buck already demonstrates his willingness to change according to the situation he’s in and lays the foundation for London’s commentary about survival of the fittest.

“He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.” 

The man in the red sweater exerts his dominance over Buck with ease, equipped with his club. Buck is hurt, but his spirit and will remain, showing he’s a resilient character. Buck is also intelligent and fast thinking; he quickly recognizes that in this new world, the strongest are in charge. This realization awakens more of Buck’s primal nature and develops the Law of Club and Fang—a rule to surviving in the North that is central to the novel.

“Buck’s first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial. No lazy, sunkissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety.”

Buck’s new home stands in stark contrast to his last. In civilization, Buck could live a lazy, easygoing life. In the North, it’s a nightmarish fight from the start. Associating the North with nightmares, and describing the South as sunkissed, heightens the differences between nature and civilization and creates tension in the story.

“The snow walls pressed him on every side, and a great surge of fear swept through him—the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It was a token that he was harking back through his own life to the lives of his forebears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly civilized dog, and of his own experience knew no trap and so could not of himself fear it.”

This early in the story, Buck sees himself as a domesticated, civilized dog. To survive, Buck feels he must channel the knowledge of his ancestors because he lacks the ability to survive in the wild himself. Buck is smart and adaptive, but he also lacks basic knowledge about surviving in the wilderness. This mixture of character traits makes him a flawed and interesting character and gives him the motivation to grow throughout the story.

“A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him. He watched and learned.”

Along with trying to channel his ancestors’ primordial knowledge, Buck learns to survive in the North by watching other dogs, developing London’s message about survival and collaboration: We can help each other learn to survive. Buck can’t be the same dog he was in the Santa Clara Valley; he can’t even eat the way he used to. He’s willing to change, even steal, and the other dogs help him realize this is what he must do to keep on living.

“He did not steal for joy of it but because of the clamour of his stomach. He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect for club and fang. In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.”

While Buck willingly steals, London avoids turning Buck into a villain or antihero. Buck doesn’t enjoy being a thief. He does it because it will help him survive. Buck’s choice to use his craftiness when stealing, and to always respect the Law of Club and Fang, also portrays him as an admirable character.

“It was inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck wanted it. He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace—that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness.”

Buck and Spitz are rivals, but they are driven by the same motivation: pride. Buck sees that pride is woven into the fabric of life as a sled dog. Pride keeps the older dogs pulling until they draw their last breaths. Pride drives Spitz to assert himself as leader, and pride motivates Buck to want to take that place from him.

“With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.”

The song of the dogs is a central symbol in the novel. Their singing calls back to a time when the world was young, and their cries further represent the resilience and defiance of living things to survive. London imbues the passage with brief but beautiful descriptions of nature—the aurora borealis and stars—creating a nuanced depiction of nature. Nature is beautiful, harsh, and sad, all at the same time.

“It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.”

This passage shows Buck’s interiority when he sings with the other dogs. He acknowledges that his experience in the wilderness—the mystery, fear, and pain—must be the same feelings his ancestors felt. His train of thought connects Buck to his ancestors more than ever. He feels a greater pull toward the past, showing his character development from a lazy Southland dog to a fierce Northern one.

“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. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.”

Buck’s persona is changing as he turns into a wilder version of himself. London uses vivid imagery, like describing the warm blood smothering Buck’s mouth, to create a striking picture of Buck’s character development. The wildness in Buck is also present in man, but London shows that Buck’s connection to nature is more intimate. When men return to the wild, they use bullets to hunt, whereas Buck sprints and kills with his own body.

“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. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”

London uses The Call of the Wild to propose philosophical questions about life and death. Here, Buck, like artists and others before him, feels most alive when he’s no longer cognizant of being alive. When he’s living in the moment, Buck is the most fulfilled, unlike his previous life in Santa Clara. This visceral feeling serves as more motivation for Buck to embrace the wild nature that was once dormant inside him.

“But it was in giving the law and making his mates live up to it, that Buck excelled. Dave and Sol-leks did not mind the change in leadership. It was none of their business. Their business was to toil, and toil mightily, in the traces. So long as that were not interfered with, they did not care what happened. Billee, the good-natured, could lead for all they cared so long as he kept order. The rest of the team, however, had grown unruly during the last days of Spitz, and their surprise was great now that Buck proceeded to lick them into shape.”

Before fighting with Spitz to the death, Buck recognized how similar they were—both prideful and willful. Now that Buck’s become the leader, however, he demonstrates that he’s a better leader, making the team cohesive and efficient. Buck demonstrates good leadership by respecting the other dogs, particularly the veterans, but also by not being afraid to ask more of the team members that haven’t been carrying their weight.

“Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened, and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks in the position he had held and served so long. For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.”

The Toil of Trace and Trail is one of the essential laws of life as a sled dog in the North; the law calls for a resilient determination to complete the task at hand. Buck sees the law has given Sol-leks and Dave purpose for years. Now that Dave is dying, he’s tormented over being incapable of performing his purpose. Dave’s anguish gives his character depth, heightens the tension of the story, and serves as a grim reminder of the fate Buck himself could meet.

“It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make the dogs travel faster, while their own inability to get under way earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling longer hours. Not only did they not know how to work the dogs, but they did not know how to work themselves”

From the moment he’s forcibly taken to the North, Buck faces a harsh environment. His masters, too, are stern, but so far, they have always known how to care for their sled dogs. Hal and Charles’s inadequate training shows a dangerous domino effect: Untrained leaders will harm an entire team. Previously, London showed the reader men who knew how to traverse the wilderness, and now he shows what happens to those who aren’t prepared.

“Mercedes nursed a special grievance—the grievance of her sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable.”

London uses Mercedes’s character to heighten the tension in the story. Her group was already unprepared from the start, and now, they’re succumbing to infighting. Her character serves as a cautionary example of spoiling and coddling someone. Mercedes has only ever known a world where she’s doted upon. When Hal and Charles prove to be incompetent, she doesn’t have the means to take charge or take care of herself.

“In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of their animals. Hal’s theory, which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club.”

Nature is harsh and unforgiving in The Call of the Wild. Buck’s former masters respected and cared for their dogs. As a result, all of them survived and even flourished. Instead of being disciplined and respectful, Hal is cruel, and everyone under his charge suffers.

“The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. The murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost.”

London uses descriptive prose about the setting to show the passage of time and develop his themes on life and death. The contrast between the silence of winter and the noise of spring utilizes sound to create a greater sense of how different winter and spring are in the North; one is ghostly, and the other is brimming with life. As the seasons change, life and death unfold in a repetitive, cyclical fashion, a central message of the novel.

“The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.”

The passage is another example of the vivid natural details London includes in his prose. The fact that no main or supporting characters are required for the world to be bustling with activity emphasizes the abundance that can be found in nature. Plants are given agency, and sonic details make the animals real. London depicts nature as harsh, but he also takes the time to highlight the beauty of the natural world.

“The bottom’s likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn’t risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.”

From the first scene he appears in, John Thornton demonstrates himself to be a wise veteran of the North. He warns Hal and Charles not to invest in luck—it’s likely to get them killed. John’s warning foreshadows Hal and Charles’s demise and shows John is a character who thinks deliberately and carefully.

“As Buck grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley.”

Buck is taken from his original home against his will, but as his story unfolds, he comes to enjoy his new life more than his previous one. The love Buck feels for John is unlike any love he’s had for a human before, and the strength of this feeling shows his complete dedication to his new life. The love between Buck and John makes both of their characters more emotionally complex and makes John’s death a tragic element of the story.

“Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his, yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come in from the wild to sit by John Thornton’s fire, rather than a dog of the soft Southland stamped with the marks of generations of civilization. Because of this very great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.”

Buck’s character has transformed since the beginning of the story. He’s no longer a Southland dog adapting to a new and harsher environment, but a wild animal who knows how to hunt and survive; he’s left his domesticated past behind him. Buck’s continued love for John, and his choice to stay by the man’s side despite his wildness, makes the love between the characters more meaningful.

“For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

London again uses vivid descriptions of nature to create beautiful and scenic imagery. Twilight and summer midnights craft an idyllic image, and the murmurs of the forest utilize sound to fill the scene with more immersive sensory detail. The call continues to pester Buck, and the senses that London describes in his prose make answering the call more alluring.

“It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping the throat wide open till the rent jugular sprouted a fountain of blood. He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no withstanding him.”

After John’s death, Buck unleashes a primal and violent version of himself upon the Yeehats. London uses graphic descriptions, including details of throats and jugulars being ripped and blood pouring out of men, to give the scene shock and impact. Buck’s fury, and the vivid details of his violence, shows how much John’s death has hurt him.