Buck's Life In The Call Of The Wild

London carried with a ease and sureness of perception that appeared also to be “without effort of discovery”- through the ages of fire and roof to the beginnings of animal creation. The theory of racial instinct, that was at the start, through long axons, a very conscious and alert process behavior indeed. This theory, as developed by such figures as Samuel Belter, Bergson or Jung, Similarly, the scene in which Buck finally disposed Spitz as the leader of the team surrounded by the ring of huskies waiting to kill and eat the vanquished king. He was a perfect instance of the ‘son-horde’ theory which Frazer traced in The Golden Bough, and of that primitive ritual to which Freud himself attributed both a sense of original sin and the fundamental

More civilized dogs like Newfoundland’s and even huskies find primitive counterparts in the wolves whose howl at the end of the story was the very sound of the wild. London “doubles” the story into opposing worlds. Buck begins in the waking world of reality and ends in a silent, white wasteland which was also the world of dream, shadow, and racial memory. Buck survives to embrace life at the end of a book informed by death as the horrifying, rhythmic reflex of an entire order of things. Life in The Call of the Wild was a survival built on the death of other living creatures. Between these opposing values Buck hovers continually in the action of the tale. Even the call of the wild itself, to which Buck responds with growing intensity throughout receives double focus twin definition: it was both lure and trap. In the second chapter, when Buck learns “The Law of Club and Fang” he builds his first warm sleeping nest in the snow, to discover the next morning: It had snowed during the night and he was completely buried. The snow Walls pressed him on every side, and a great surge of fear swept