The Analysis of the Character of Buck in The Call of Wild1.doc

关于野性的呼唤中巴克形象的分析The Analysis of the Character of Buck in The Call of WildContentsAbstract.1Key words.1I. Introduction21. Biography of Jack London.22. The origin of The Call of Wild.3II. Literature review.5III. Character Analyzing of Buck.71. General situations of Buck.72. Life-and-death struggles and surviving in the primitive world.81) Struggle against the violet master and environment 82) Fast-learner and fittest survivor93. Pursuer of the new life and the final independence.94. Fierce and cunning leader10IV. Conclusion.11References.11Abstract: The Call of Wild is the masterpiece of Jack London, who is one of the best novelists in the early 20 century. The canine protagonist of the story and his characters are the main factors to cause his novel perpetual, which embodies the authors thoughts and ideas. The Call of the Wild exemplifies the features of a turn-of-the-century movement known as literary naturalism. London's own experience of poverty, grinding factory work, life on the street, and imprisonment had shown him that, for many, life was a brutal struggle for survival. A social Darwinist, influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer, London was convinced that many of the beaten and degraded people that populated the lower strata of society were there because of hereditary and environmental circumstances effectively beyond their individual control. In this essay, it will mainly analyze the complicate characters of Buck and show why the novel has always been popular.Key words: character; analysis; the fittest of survival; 摘要：杰克·伦敦作为二十世纪初最伟大的小说家之一，野性的呼唤是其代表作。其中故事的主人公巴克的性格是令这部作品在读者心中长盛不衰的主要原因，而巴克的身上难免赋予了作者的思想。野性的呼唤展示了在世纪之交的一项文学运动自然主义的文学特点。伦敦的贫困经历，如：抛光场的工作， 在街头露宿的日子和牢狱生活都让伦敦明白对多数人来说，生活就是为生机而努力挣扎。作为一个社会达尔文主义者，同时又受到了斯宾塞理论的影响，伦敦认为：之所以有许多社会下层的人们受打击、受压迫就是因为传统的社会环境不受个体的控制。这也在野性的呼唤中得到了充分的放映。本文主要对巴克的多重性格加以分析，从而展示了主人公艺术形象的永久魅力。关键词：性格；分析；适者生存;I. Introduction1. Biography of Jack London"I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew," Jack London once wrote of his decision to take to the seas as an oyster pirate at the age of fifteen. "There was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in being a machine slave." London's venturesome spirit brought him more adventure before he was twenty-three years old than most people experience in a lifetime. London was a coal shoveler, a sailor, a hobo and a convict all before he entered high school, and when he finally got to high school he found it so boring he packed his bags and headed for the Yukon in search of gold. London spent his first twenty-three years as an adventurer and a vagabond, but in 1899, after years of fitful trying, he finally began to achieve success as a writer. Before his death in 1916, London wrote nearly two-dozen novels-some of which have become classics of American literature-as well as hundreds of short stories. Today London is remembered as both one of America's greatest writers and one of the greatest adventure writers of all time.John Griffith London was born in San Francisco, the child of a spiritualist, Flora Wellman, and her common-law husband, William Henry Chaney, an itinerant astrologer. Although in later life Chaney denied to London that he was his father, the evidence leaves little doubt of his paternity. The year of her son's birth, Flora Wellman married John London, who accepted the boy as his own and gave him his name. The family's declining economic condition, the result of Flora's get-rich-quick schemes that invariably failed, entailed frequent relocation, so that London's boyhood was lonely and insecure. By age sixteen, however, he had borrowed the money to buy a sloop and established himself as "Prince of the Oyster Pirates" on San Francisco Bay. The next year he spent several months as a hand on a sealing schooner working the North Pacific; on his return to San Francisco he won first prize in a newspaper contest with his description of a typhoon off the coast of Japan. After a brief but debilitating stint shoveling coal in a power station, London joined in 1894 the western detachment of "Coxey's Army" for its bonus march on Washington, D.C. He deserted it, however, in the Midwest to ride the rails as a hobo and chicken thief, until in Niagara Falls, New York, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to a month in the county prison-experiences he would later recount in The Road (1907). Returning to California, London finished high school in Oakland, joined the Socialist Party, and entered the University of California at Berkeley, which he attended for only one semester in 1896. Like his mother, ambitious to get rich quick, London joined the Klondike gold rush and spent the winter of 1897 in the Yukon, where he found little gold but a rich vein of narrative material that he would mine lucratively in his meteoric rise to literary fame. Once again in California, but now with an amazing variety of experience for a man of his age, London determined to pursue a career as a writer, or "brain worker" as he termed it, and began inundating publishers with everything from poetry to philosophical essays-at first to no avail. But in 1899 he sold his first stories, the most financially rewarding of which was a science-fiction tale, "A Thousand Deaths" (collected in Curious Fragments, 1975), for which he was paid forty dollars. This sale allowed him to pay off his debts and confirmed his decision to be a writer.2. The origin of The Call of WildIn July of 1897 two ships docked in San Francisco and Seattle carrying bags of gold discovered in the Yukon territory of Alaska. The United States was experiencing an economic recession, and many men were out of work. For men desperate for work and money, the news of gold free for the taking was like dropping a match in a hayloft. About one hundred thousand men set off for the Yukon, determined to make their fortune. Though the United States had purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, Canada technically owned the Yukon territory where the gold had been discovered. Consequently, Canada made the rules and regulations whereby gold-seekers could enter the territory.Determined to keep order, the Canadian police decreed that in order to enter the territory, travelers must carry a years worth of gear and supplies. Of course, this was such a prodigious weight that many were obliged to abandon most of their supplies along the trail when they proved too heavy to bear. Consequently, the real gold-rush proved to be for those selling supplies and providing other services at unheard of premiums.London was soon caught in the gold rush frenzy. On July 25, 1897, he sailed for the Klondike aboard the SS Umatilla. On board the ship, London found three other miners who agreed to form a team. The four men could hardly have known of the perils that would soon confront them as they spied the imposing Coast Range which separated them from gold.Jack London spent a single winter in the Canadian North during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898. The gold rush did not make London rich, but it furnished him with plenty of material for his career as a writer, which began in the late 1890s and continued until his death in 1916. He worked as a reporter, covering the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s; meanwhile, he published over fifty books and became, at the time, Americas most famous author. For a while, he was one of the most widely read authors in the world. He embodied, it was said, the spirit of the American West, and his portrayal of adventure and frontier life seemed like a breath of fresh air in comparison with nineteenth-century Victorian fiction, which was often overly concerned with what had begun to seem like trivial and irrelevant social norms.When he returned, he claimed to have come upon a mythic wolf which inspired the character of Buck in The Call of the Wild. Whether or not London was speaking of a true encounter, his experiences with the Gold Rush provided the inspiration for a tale of resilience and exploration. Much of the story takes place in Alaska, traveling between Dawson and Skagway. The discovery of gold prompted a mass exodus to the Klondike, where gold was hypothetically free for the taking. The town of Dawson became the heart of the Gold Rush; for in 1886, Captain Moore, a citizen of Canada who had been prospecting for gold in the Canadian northwest, discovered a trail he called the "White Pass." This trail allowed for the transportation of supplies, correspondence, and men into the Alaskan interior, and it lead directly to Dawson. In reality, the journey to the Klondike was a dangerous and expensive undertaking. Canadian law stated that gold-seekers could only enter the territory if they entered with a years worth of provisions. This law was rigidly enforced by police patrols. Meanwhile, the journey to the Klondike by ship was so dangerous that many threw supplies overboard to lighten the load. Once the ships had landed, the journey grew no easier. Numerous memoirs and diaries remain from the men and women who toiled over the icy trail in that year. Their accounts of the journey between Skaguay and Dawson are the best source of what life was like on an expedition. Writings speak of rugged canyons, boldly ascending mountains, and projecting cliffs. London borrowed money from his sister to make the trip. On the one hand he was spurred on by poverty, for America was in the throes of the Great Depression. On the other hand, he sought adventure and inspiration. While London did not strike it rich in the Klondike, he found the inspiration he was seeking, and that impetus would lead to tremendous success and certain amount of fortune. London would have had abundant experience with the sled-dogs that were the most popular choice for transporting people and supplies into the Klondike. The most common breeds were the huskies (and their cross-breeds from the river country), stocky and gray with short, erect ears and thick coat, intelligent and majestic, and the malamute, an Alaska Indian dog crossed with the wolf and resembling the wolf in shape and size. They were mostly brownish-gray, friendly and easily led. In the Gold Rush Arctic, the dog was of paramount importance. Men could not cover the great distances involved; much less carry their food and equipment, on foot. As yet there were no machines, not even railroads. Horses were bogged down by the snow and could not survive on fish, the most readily available food. London also would have known that many large dogs like Buck were stolen from the Pacific Northwest and sold as sled-dogs. London was clearly influenced by several important philosophers and scientists during the writing of The Call of the Wild. Darwins theory of Evolution, Herbert Spencers ideas about the "survival of the fittest", and Nietzsches "superman" theory play important roles in plot and characterization. The presence of these overarching ideas lends credence to those who argue that The Call of the Wild should be read as an allegory for human experience. London sold the Call of the Wild in 1903 for a flat fee of two thousand dollars. He received no royalties from the millions of copies that sold in America and overseas. But, the popularity of The Call of the Wild played an important role in Londons continued success. II. Literature ReviewThe Call of Wild is one of the most widely translated and published books by an American writer, and a proper, comprehensive bibliography. The Call of the Wild would require a tremendous international research effort. William C. Frierson noted in a 1928 PMLA article that "It is well known that a heated controversy took place during the eighteen-nineties over the inclusion of fact, brutal fact, in fiction." But what are the brutal facts that might begin a proper genealogy of The Call of the Wild? For example, The Call of the Wild was published during a period of unprecedented American imperial expansion in the Western hemisphere; but the novel also appeared during a period of intense debate over the influence of French literary Naturalism on English and American fiction. Both the geo-political situation of the United States in 1903 and the literary-critical debates of the era might provide fruitful points of departure; they might even cross paths at several points. But the beginnings of any genealogy are necessarily turbulent and difficult, and we must restrict ourselves in the present introduction to the contentious literary-critical debates that have engaged The Call of the Wild with the understanding that they offer a point of departure for other more detailed inquiries into the novel and its historical milieu. William Firepersons article offers the occasion to list three notable motives to undertake a study of the critical history of Londons novel. The first is that Firepersons article is an excellent, brief introduction to the critical debates that were later repeated when Jack Londons writings first achieved success in the United States; it is notable that Firepersons article was published in late the 1920s during another resurgence of the Naturalist style in American fiction that was prompted in part by new editions of Jack Londons writings and a resurgence in critical interest in his works. The second reason pertains to the fact that Firepersons article is not an article about Jack London; the serious, prospective student should not limit the study of Jack London to specialized works but should also study the literary debates and critical histories of the late 19th century and early twentieth centuries. The third reason stems from the fact that Frierson was a scholar of British Literature and his article places the debate over literary Naturalism in an international context; the article is a fine example of a careful engagement with scholarly traditions of other nations and how those have approached Jack London and the debates that are important to any understanding of his writings. The student with a reading knowledge of foreign languages should study the numerous scholarly works available in other languages and literary traditions. A careful, varied, and historically informed approach to The Call of the Wild will enrich the students reading of Jack Londons work. The Call of the Wild drew immediate critical attention from popular journalists. The Call of the Wild is a story of action and of ideas. Filled with scenes of struggle and violence, it is also, according to Geismara, "beautiful prose poem of the buried impulses," demonstrating the slow process by which Buck sheds the influenc