《荒野的呼唤》主题分析 毕业论文

【标题】《荒野的呼唤》主题分析

【作者】龚琳

【关键词】适者生存；人性；自然主义

【指导老师】张亚军

【专业】英语

【正文】

I. Introduction

Before there was Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Mailer, there was Jack London. Perhaps no other American writer led a life as exciting as that described in his fiction. Born in San Francisco to an unwed mother from a wealthy background. Jack London grew up in the slum area of Oakland, California, a place which he later called “the cellar of society.” Born out of wedlock on January 12, 1876, he never knew his father, William Henry Chaney, who had left Jack’s mother, Flora Wellman, before Jack’s birth. On September 7, 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, from whom her son Jack took his name.

By the age of fifteen, London had turned delinquent. Barely seventeen, he signed aboard the schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan and the Bering Sea. Returning from the voyage in 1894, London began to be interested in the plight of the underprivileged and working classes, so he joined a group of militant workers who were going to Washington to protest the wretched working conditions in the country, caused by the Depression of 1894. He did not reach Washington, however; he deserted this “Industrial Army” in Hannibal, Missouri, and for a time he traveled around the country as a hobo. At Niagara Falls, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to the Erie County Penitentiary. He was released after thirty days, and he quickly caught the first train heading West, arriving eventually in Oakland.

It was probably soon after his release from the penitentiary that London became seriously interested in politics, and as a result, he joined an Oakland branch of the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. Then soon afterward, he enrolled as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he attempted to further his studies in the most influential scientific and philosophic theories of the late nineteenth century—Darwinism, Social Darwinism, Nietzscheism, and Marxism. He soon became restless, though, and he left the university during his second semester as a student. From California, he went North, to the Klondike to search for gold, and his adventures there became the basis of many stories. In fact, two of his most famous novels, The Call of the Wild and White Fang,

are set in the North, and while these two novels are perhaps his most famous in the United States, London is equally well known in places outside of the United States as the author of a number of socialistic works: The Iron Heel (1908), The War of the Classes (1905), Revolution and Other Essays (1910), and The People of the Abyss (1903). London has said that The People of the Abyss was his favorite book; it is a sociological study about the worst areas of poverty in London, England’s East End and is based on London’s first-hand experiences while he lived there.

Early in 1900, London married Bessie Maddern and began his career as a serious writer. He soon finished his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, which was published in 1902, and in the summer of 1903, London met Charmian Kittredge, whom he promptly fell in love with and abruptly left his wife and two daughters for.

In ill health most of his life, by 1915, London was almost lame. His bowels gave him continual pain, and in order to reduce the pain, London began using opium and morphine, and it was not long before he became addicted to the drugs. As a consequence, his kidneys were also eventually wrecked by his misuse of all of the drugs, and London refused to even quit smoking, although he had cancer of the throat. By November 21,1916, London was in such poor health that he spent the entire day in bed. Then shortly before dawn the next day, he injected himself with what would prove to be an overdose of drugs. That evening, he died; he was forty years old. There is, naturally, some question as to whether his death was an intentional suicide.

Jack London wrote lots of works in his whole life, one of the most popular is the Call of the Wild which was Published in 1903, and it is generally considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon during the days of the 19th century Klondike Gold Rushes. Although the novel has long been considered a children’s book, many literary scholars have argued that the novel’s complexities warrant close analysis. Chief among the topics of interest to scholars is the novel's relationships to the philosophy of the “survival of the fittest” that was in vogue at the turn of the century.

II. Survival for the Fittest

Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species (1859), developed a theory that life on earth evolved through a process of natural selection. Those creatures that were strong and were able to adapt to their environment were the ones that survived. The process as seen by Darwin was ruthless and amoral; there was no beneficent God overseeing it and ensuring justice or tempering it with mercy. London appears to have had Darwin in mind when he