《野性的呼唤》英文书评

A Review of The Call of The Wild

I About Jack London

Jack London(born Jan. 12, 1876, died Nov. 22, 1916), who life symbolized the

power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century.

His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against

hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London

pasd his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to

a on a aling ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that

was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in

writing. And his experiences of arching for gold in the Klondike (in Canada) left

their mark in his stories. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism

and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. He retired to his ranch near

Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various dias and drug treatments.

Jack London is best known for his books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and

The Sea-Wolf, and a few short stories, such as "To Build a Fire" and "The White

Silence." In fact, he was a prolific writer who fiction explored their geographies and

their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the South Pacific. He experimented with

many literary forms, from conventional love stories and dystopias (反乌托邦，政治讽

刺小说) to science fantasy. His noted journalism included war correspondence,

boxing stories, and the life of Molokai lepers. A committed socialist, he insisted

against editorial pressures to write political essays and inrt social criticism in his

fiction. He was among the most influential figures of his day, who understood how to

create a public persona and u the media to market his lf-created image of

poor-boy-turned-success. He left over fifty books of novels, stories, journalism, and

essays, many of which have been translated and continue to be read around the world.

II Plot

Buck is a dog who leads a comfortable life in a California ranch home with his

owner, a judge, until he is stolen and sold to pay off a gambling debt. Buck is taken

to Alaska and sold to a pair of French Canadians who were impresd with his

physique. They train him as a sled dog, and he quickly learns how to survive the cold

winter nights and the pack society by obrving his teammates. Buck is later sold

again and pass hands veral times, all the while improving his abilities as a sled

dog and pack leader.

Eventually, Buck is sold to a man, his wife, and her brother who know nothing about

sledding nor surviving in the Alaskan wilderness. They struggle to control the sled

and ignore warnings not to travel during the spring melt. As they journey on, they run

into John Thornton, an experienced outdoors man, who notices that all of the sled

dogs are in terrible shape from the ill treatment of their handlers. Thornton warns the

trio against crossing the river, but they refu to listen and order Buck to mush.

Exhausted, starving, and nsing the danger ahead, Buck refus. Recognizing him as

a remarkable dog and disgusted by the driver's beating of the dog, Thornton cuts him

free from his traces and tells the trio he's keeping him. After some argument, the trio

leaves and tries to cross the river, but as Thornton warned the ice gives way and they

drown.

As Thornton nurs Buck back to health, Buck comes to love him and grows devoted

to him. Thornton takes him on trips to pan for gold. Thornton and his friends go to

their camp and continue their arch for gold, while Buck begins exploring the

wilderness around them and begins socializing with a local wolf pack. One morning,

he returns from a three-day long hunt to find his beloved master and the others in the

camp have been killed by some Yeehats (Native Americans). Buck finds some of

them in the camp and kills them to avenge Thornton, later finding other members of

the tribe, then returns to the woods to become alpha wolf (领头狼) of the pack. Each

year he revisits the site where Thornton died, never completely forgetting the master

he loved.

Buck, a powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, lives on Judge Miller’s estate in California’s

Santa Clara Valley. He leads a comfortable life there, but it comes to an end when men discover gold in

the Klondike region of Canada and a great demand aris for strong dogs to pull sleds. Buck is

kidnapped by a gardener on the Miller estate and sold to dog traders, who teach Buck to obey by beating

him with a club and, subquently, ship him north to the Klondike.

Arriving in the chilly North, Buck is amazed by the cruelty he es around him. As soon as

another dog from his ship, Curly, gets off the boat, a pack of huskies violently attacks and kills her.

Watching her death, Buck vows never to let the same fate befall him. Buck becomes the property of

Francois and Perrault, two mail carriers working for the Canadian government, and begins to adjust to life

as a sled dog. He recovers the instincts of his wild ancestors: he learns to fight, scavenge for food, and

sleep beneath the snow on winter nights. At the same time, he develops a fierce rivalry with Spitz, the

lead dog in the team. One of their fights is broken up when a pack of wild dogs invades the camp, but

Buck begins to undercut Spitz’s authority, and eventually the two dogs become involved in a major fight.

Buck kills Spitz and takes his place as the lead dog.

With Buck at the head of the team, Francois and Perrault’s sled makes record time. However, the men

soon turn the team over to a mail carrier who forces the dogs to carry much heavier loads. In the midst of

a particularly arduous trip, one of the dogs becomes ill, and eventually the driver has to shoot him. At the

end of this journey, the dogs are exhausted, and the mail carrier lls them to a group of American gold

hunters—Hal, Charles, and Mercedes.

Buck’s new masters are inexperienced and out of place in the wilderness. They overload the sled, beat

the dogs, and plan poorly. Halfway through their journey, they begin to run out of food. While the humans

bicker, the dogs begin to starve, and the weaker animals soon die. Of an original team of fourteen, only

five are still alive when they limp into John Thornton’s camp, still some distance from their destination.

Thornton warns them that the ice over which they are traveling is melting and that they may fall through it.

Hal dismiss the warnings and tries to get going immediately. The other dogs begin to move, but

Buck refus. When Hal begins to beat him, Thornton intervenes, knocking a knife from Hal’s hand and

cutting Buck loo. Hal curs Thornton and starts the sled again, but before they have gone a quarter of

a mile, the ice breaks open, swallowing both the humans and the dogs.

Thornton becomes Buck’s master, and Buck’s devotion to him is total. He saves Thornton from drowning

in a river, attacks a man who tries to start a fight with Thornton in a bar, and, most remarkably, wins a

$1,600 wager for his new master by pulling a sled carrying a thousand-pound load. But Buck’s love for

Thornton is mixed with a growing attraction to the wild, and he feels as if he is being called away from

civilization and into the wilderness. This feeling grows stronger when he accompanies Thornton and his

friends in arch of a lost mine hidden deep in the Canadian forest.

While the men arch for gold, Buck ranges far afield, befriending wolves and hunting bears and moo.

He always returns to Thornton in the end, until, one day, he comes back to camp to find that Yeehat

Indians have attacked and killed his master. Buck attacks the Indians, killing veral and scattering the

rest, and then heads off into the wild, where he becomes the leader of a pack of wolves. He becomes a

legendary figure, a Ghost Dog, fathering countless cubs and inspiring fear in the Yeehats—but every

year he returns to the place where Thornton died, to mourn his master before returning to his life in the

wild.

III My Opinions

The law of club and fang

Through Buck’s experiences living in the wild, Jack London wants to

tell us that the world is dominated by tho who are much stronger and

more powerful than common people, and only the stronger ones could

exist. This is the law of club and fang. Buck gradually realizes the law

and begins to obey the law after he is stolen and taken to the wild. The

savage environment which is full of tricks, dangers and deaths turns him

to be more powerful and cunning. Finally, he becomes the leader of his

team. Similar to the wild, our society becomes crueler and crueler, and

living in the society becomes harder and harder. If you want to exist, to

have a good life, you should be tough enough to stand the sufferings; you

should keep alert, watch and learn; you should make yourlf stronger

than others. This is the law of living.

Loyalty, Honor and Love

The dogs in the book are all loyal to their masters. For example, a man

makes a wager with Thornton over Buck's strength and devotion. Buck

wins the bet by breaking a half-ton sled out of the frozen ground, then

pulling it 100 yards by himlf.

In addition, all dogs have n of honor. They are all proud of being

sled dogs, and devote themlves to the work. For example, Dave, who is

going to die, still insists on working. “Sick as he was, Dave rented

being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened

and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks (another dog) in

the position he had held and rved so long. For the pride of trace and

trail was his, and, sick to death, he could not bear that another dog should

do his work.”

Both loyalty and honor are bad on love which is what touches me

deeply. Becau of love to Thornton, Buck does such thing that ems

impossible to accomplish. Becau of n of honor, Dave insists on

working till he dies.

The call of the wild

As we know, Buck answers the call of and returns to the wild finally. In

my opinion, the call is not from the wild though Buck often hears the

howl of the wolves. Instead, it is from the bottom of Buck’s heart. The

call is the will or the instinct which makes him want to be himlf: A

wolf.

I think every one of us has a call in our hearts. The call is our dream,

goal or something we really want to do. However, under the pressure of

society, we often have to give up our dreams or goals, and do things we

are unwilling to do. So we should learn something from Buck: Just follow

the call, and be yourlf!