The Call of the Wild

Everyday we see how people face their everyday trials, but what about animals? Do they face go through hardships? In Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, he describes the hardships of a dog, Buck, and how he overcomes them.

Throughout the whole book there is a constant theme about the wild. When Buck meets the man with the red sweater at the beginning of his journey, he learns very quickly that he could not possibly succeed easily. He was beaten and learned quickly just how harsh everything was and that he must learn how to choose his battles if he wanted to win. Men could no longer be trusted in this new world of his. Later on in the story is mentioned some newcomers who had brought a ton of luggage. When it comes Buck’s way of life, all that stuff is just baggage and is extra weight leading to destruction in the wild. In the end, Buck finally learns this and completely let’s go, proving that he is ready for the wild.

While reading the novel, being written in the dog’s perspective, the novel was constantly interesting and very well portrayed. I loved the way the novel was written because of the novel’s uniqueness. I could easily follow along and could easily put myself in Buck’s shoes, imagining just how awful everything was, being freezing and hungry in an unfamiliar place. The novel used good diction such as how Buck fled ignominiously and how Buck had a dominant primordial beast within him. Over all, this book was very well written.

The characters within the story all affected the outcome of the story and helped contribute to tying Buck to the theme. Curly, for example, was destroyed by the other dogs because Curly was weak. Through this, Buck learned the‘The Law of Club and Fang’. This law was the first step towards his call to the wild. Spitz on the other hand, led to Buck gaining his first dominant role in his new life, training him for when he would be a pack leader of the wild. Another example is Mercedes and being over packed. She had too much baggage and could not handle the toils of the new life because she could not let go of her past life. This lead to her and other’s death, but was a lesson to Buck.

This book had many excelling attributes, but I would not recommend this book to everyone. I would recommend this book mainly to older boys or older teens and up because I think the book would be more appealing to them. The theme and the way the theme is presented just has a way of sounding like an older reader’s type.