Jack London’s Nihilistic Dog Story

I read Jack London’s Call of the Wild for the first time this year as part of the Treasure Valley Big Read. I didn’t know quite what to expect.

What I got was a great adventure story with disturbingly nihilistic undertones as we follow journey of one dog from pampered lovable family pet to man-killing beast.

Buck is a shepherd dog who is kidnapped from his home and sold up North as the Klondike Gold rush led to greater demand for dogs and a vast black market. Buck suffers cruelty and must adapt to survive in the Frozen North.

London’s storytelling is tight and devoid of the overlong and flowery descriptions that make many works of the same era unwieldy to modern readers. Yet, the story is  disturbing on a profound level. Rather, it’s that London’s broader message in Buck’s “decisions.”

As Buck fights for survival, London tells us that “fair play” was a forgotten code, and that Buck’s increasingly aggressive behavior marked, “further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.”

The most absurd part of the book is perhaps when Buck, in a sustained effort to displace the lead dog on the sled team, Buck planned a “covert mutiny” subtlety undermining the leadership of the lead dog.

Machivellian plotting doesn’t quite seem in character for a dog.

 London celebrates each and every increasingly violent turn by Buck as London believed that each step towards the wild drew him close to his evolutionary ancestors. The survival of the fittest was not a biological fact, it was something to be celebrated and gloried in.  London didn’t think humans should be any more sentimental. He wrote a short story that spoke approvingly of using biological warfare on China to stop the threat of “the Yellow Peril.”

 In the midst of this dark and dreary tale comes the remarkable character of John Thornton. Thornton saves Buck from being killed by a cruel and idiotic driver and then nurses Buck back to health. What makes Thornton stand out from the other human character in the story is that Thornton had no ulterior motive for his kindness, and he was consistently kind from start to finish. While there were some men who drove Buck’s dog team who treated him decently, they did so out of professionalism, Thornton acted out of love.  

 This part of the story has great appeal because people can relate to it. Most movie versions of Call of the Wild I’ve seen focus on the relationship between Thornton and Buck in Chapter 6 and expanded on it while giving short shrift to the majority of the novel. The 1972 adaptation starring Charlton Heston ended with Thornton and Buck running off to join the wolf pack quietly.

 The book itself took this turn perhaps because it needed to in order to give us some sympathy for what Buck does in Chapter 7 when some Yeehat Indians kill Thornton and the rest of the party. He responds by killing several Indians in an utterly absurd scene.

Buck has his own thoughts on the killing of the Yeehats: 

At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself–a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs.

And the novel implies that Buck’s killing didn’t end with avenging Thornton, but rather continued as several hunters came into the area and didn’t return alive, leading the Yeehats to believe the area was controlled by an evil spirit.

Our wonderful heroic dog.

In the end, Call of the Wild doesn’t celebrate natural beauty or splendor, but a rejection of morality and civilization. It’s certainly a book that has no doubt influenced many folks who are screaming for the unfettered breeding of wolves in rural Idaho despite the pleas of rural human beings. Presumably, this is part of the reason why the book was this year’s Big Read.

It is a dark story, that’s part Darwinism and part mysticism. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept Buck’s almost magical powers, it’s an interesting adventure story. For me, the spiritual message undermined the enjoyment of the rest of the story.

Read more at Adam’s Blog