Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Indispensable Struggle for Mastery
The Call of the Wild is a story of transformation
in which the old Buck—the civilized, moral Buck—must adjust to the
harsher realities of life in the frosty North, where survival is
the only imperative. Kill or be killed is the only morality among
the dogs of the Klondike, as Buck realizes from the moment he steps
off the boat and watches the violent death of his friend Curly.
The wilderness is a cruel, uncaring world, where only the strong
prosper. It is, one might say, a perfect Darwinian world, and London’s
depiction of it owes much to Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory
of evolution to explain the development of life on Earth and envisioned
a natural world defined by fierce competition for scarce resources.
The term often used to describe Darwin’s theory, although he did
not coin it, is “the survival of the fittest,” a phrase that describes
Buck’s experience perfectly. In the old, warmer world, he might
have sacrificed his life out of moral considerations; now, however,
he abandons any such considerations in order to survive.
But London is not content to make the struggle for survival
the central theme of his novel; instead, his protagonist struggles
toward a higher end, namely mastery. We see this struggle particularly
in Buck’s conflict with Spitz, in his determination to become the
lead dog on Francois and Perrault’s team, and, at the end of the
novel, in the way that he battles his way to the leadership of the
wolf pack. Buck does not merely want to survive; he wants to dominate—as
do his rivals, dogs like Spitz. In this quest for domination, which
is celebrated by London’s narrative, we can observe the influence
of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the late nineteenth century.
Nietzsche’s worldview held that the world was composed of masters,
those who possessed what he called “the will to power,” and slaves,
those who did not possess this will. Nietzsche delighted in using
animal metaphors, comparing masters to “birds of prey” and “blonde
beasts” and comparing slaves to sheep and other herd animals. London’s
Buck, with his indomitable strength and fierce desire for mastery,
is a canine version of Nietzsche’s masterful men, his Napoleon Bonapartes
and Julius Caesars. Buck is a savage creature, in a sense, and hardly
a moral one, but London, like Nietzsche, expects us to applaud this
ferocity. His novel suggests that there is no higher destiny for
man or beast than to struggle, and win, in the battle for mastery.
The Power of 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 the ways
of the wild; rather, Buck gradually recovers primitive
instincts and memories that his wild ancestors possessed, which
have been buried as dogs have become civilized creatures. The technical
term for what happens to Buck is atavism—the reappearance in a modern creature
of traits that defined its remote forebears. London returns to this
theme 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,” we are told. “He linked the past with the present,
and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm
to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed.” Buck even has
occasional visions of this older world, when humans wore animal
skins and lived in caves, and when wild dogs hunted their prey in
the primeval forests. His connection to his ancestral identity is
thus 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 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.
The Laws of Civilization and of Wilderness
While the two lives that Buck leads stand in stark contrast
to each other, this contrast does not go unchallenged throughout
the novel. His life with Judge Miller is leisurely, calm, and unchallenging, while
his transition to the wilderness shows him a life that is savage, frenetic,
and demanding. While it would be tempting to assume that these two
lives are polar opposites, events later in the novel show some ways
in which both the wild and civilization have underlying social codes,
hierarchies, and even laws. For example, the pack that Buck joins
is not anarchic; the position of lead dog is coveted and given to
the most powerful dog. The lead dog takes responsibility for group
decisions and has a distinctive style of leadership; the main factor
in the rivalry between Buck and Spitz is that Buck sides with the
less popular, marginal dogs instead of the stronger ones. Buck,
then, advocates the rights of a minority in the pack—a position
that is strikingly similar to that of his original owner, the judge, who
is the novel’s most prominent example of civilization.
The rules of the civilized and uncivilized worlds are,
of course, extremely different—in the wild, many conflicts are resolved through
bloody fights rather than through reasoned mediation. But the novel
suggests that what is important in both worlds is to understand
and abide by the rules which that world has set up, and it is only
when those rules are broken that we see true savagery and disrespect
for life. Mercedes, Hal, and Charles enter the wild with little understanding
of the rules one must follow to become integrated and survive. Their
inability to ration food correctly, their reliance upon their largely
useless knife and gun, and their disregard for the dogs’ suffering
all attest to laws of the wilderness that they misunderstand or
choose to ignore. As a result, the wilderness institutes a natural
consequence for their actions. Precisely because they do not heed
the warnings that the wild provides via one of its residents, John
Thornton, they force the team over unstable ice and fall through
to their deaths. The novel seems to say that the wild does not allow
chaos or wanton behavior but instead institutes a strict social
and natural order different from, but not inferior to, that of the
civilized world.
The Membership of the Individual in the Group
When Buck arrives in the wild, his primordial instincts
do not awaken immediately, and he requires a great deal of external
help before he is suited to life there. Help arrives in realizations
about the very different rules that govern the world outside of
civilization, but also in the support of the pack of which he becomes
a part. Two dogs in particular, Dave and Sol-leks, after having
established their seniority, instruct Buck in the intricacies of
sled pulling. Furthermore, the group members take pride in their
work, even though they are serving men. When they make trips in
good time, they congratulate themselves—they all participate in
a common enterprise.
