The Call of the Wild
Last fall my second-grade daughter read the Great Illustrated Classics version of The Call of the Wild. She loved it and read it in one sitting. She eagerly wanted to talk about it afterwards. As she asked me questions and highlighted important plot points, I realized that I had somehow never read Jack London’s famous The Call of the Wild. I decided I had better do so.
Reading The Call of the Wild, originally published in 1903, is fast. The novella is only 164 (in the edition I read), and yet, its brevity is part of its magic. Jack London follows the life of Buck, his canine protagonist, from a life of luxury in sunny California, to one of toil in the harsh world of the Alaskan Klondike.
The Call of the Wild masterfully draws the reader into Buck’s story and impressively gifts the dog with human-like qualities, but does so in a way that feels natural. London famously creates an adventure narrative in which all the humans are rather cursory, expendable, temporary. I do not mean to underestimate the connection Buck feels to some humans, one in particular, but ultimately, Buck’s story leads him (and the reader) further and further into the wild.
In sharing the severe and unforgiving nature of the Alaskan Klondike through the experience of a dog, Jack London questions the standard binary of man as master and sled-dog as beast. As Buck heads into the Alaskan wilds, the call of the wild grows strong, even as he recalls moments in the evolution of the inherited domestication of his species. Buck’s inherited memories, of man in animal skins with uncut, tangled hair, around a fire in a cave, provide an interesting literary device. As he recalls them, so too does he seem to go back before them as the call of the wild grows stronger. As the novella comes to a close, Buck’s adventures are in no way over, yet the human reader must leave him to ponder the divide between the domestic and the wild likely present within us all.
While I certainly enjoyed London’s prose and Buck’s adventures, so much of the fun of reading this book stemmed from my shared reading experience with my daughter. While we did not read the same text, we read the same story, and I have enjoyed hearing her thoughts about Buck and the many masters who wandered into and out of his life. I wholeheartedly encourage parents to read stories alongside their children and discuss; as my daughter’s reading matures, I look forward to future classic buddy reads with her.
A Few Great Passages:
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive” (57).
“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest” (121).
Bibliography:
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild. Chatham River Press: New York, 1983.
