1、 The Wild is still callingAfter reading The Call of The Wild Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is Jack Londons famous novel set during the Klondike Gold Rush. Its author, Jack London, who had been a prospector in the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s, was regarded as the Americas most famou
2、s author at that time.The novels protagonist is a dog named Buck, a physically impressive dog, living the good life in California when he gets stolen and put into dog slavery. For him, this means pulling a ridiculously heavy sled through miles and miles of frozen ice with little or nothing to eat an
3、d frequent beatings. As the definition of a domestic dog, Buck is out of his element until he begins to adapt to his surroundings, and learn from the other dogs. Buck is involved in a struggle for power with another dog, Spitz. They end up fighting and Buck wins, taking over as leader of the sled do
4、g team. The team changes human management and the new drivers dont seem to be very competent. Theyre bad drivers and end up killing everyone, including themselves. Fortunately, Buck is saved by a kind man named John Thornton, moment before the group death in an icy river.Buck becomes attached to Tho
5、rnton and even saves his life several times. Buck sets off on a journey with his new master and several other men, loving his new life, except for the need to run off and kill things in the woods every once in a while. Buck fights with temptation: stay with Thornton, or kill things? Be civilized, or
6、 be wild? And naturally there are several missed phone calls from the wild. At the end of the Call of the Wild, Thornton is killed by the Yeehat tribe. Buck is then free to run with the wild dog packs.The novel deals with Buck as though he were a person with thoughts and emotions and touches me by i
7、ts theme of pursuing ancestral memory and primitive instincts.When Buck enters the wild, he must learn countless lessons in order to survive, and he learns them well. But the novel suggests that his success in the frozen North is not merely a matter of “learning”; rather, Buck gradually “recovers” p
8、rimitive instincts and memories that his wild ancestors possessed, which have been buried in modern civilized creatures, dogs. The technical term for what happens to Buck is atavismthe reappearance in a modern creature of traits that was defined by its remote forefathers. London returns to this them
9、e again and again, constantly reminding us that Buck is “retrogressing”, as the novel puts it into a wilder way of life that all dogs once shared “He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn.” Buck even has occasional visions of this older world, when humans wore animal skins
10、 and lived in caves, and when wild dogs hunted their prey in the primeval forests. His connection to his ancestral identity is more than instinctual; it is mystical. The civilized world, which seems so strong, turns out to be nothing more than a thin veneer, which is quickly worn away to reveal the
11、ancient instincts lying dormant underneath. Buck hears the call of the wild, and London implies that, in the right circumstances, we might hear it too.Jack London isnt necessarily making the claim that we should all run around naked, killing and eating with our bare hands. Instead, he uses a dog to
12、ask the question of what all this civilization is really doing for us. Because aside from the starvation, beatings, and the nearly freezing to death, Buck might just be better off in the wild than where he was before this whole mess began. Why? Because its what he was meant to do, what his body was built for. So the next time you find yourself on the verge of giving in to those primal instincts, take a minute. And pick up the phone, because The Wild is still calling.
