The Call of the Wild is widely considered as Jack London’s masterpiece. The Call of the Wild is a story about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the cold Alaskan Klondike, based on London’s experiences as a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness and his thoughts on nature and the struggle for existence.
The Call of the Wild audiobook by Jack London
The Call of the Wild audiobook‘s plot: Buck is taken from his home on a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, and sold into duty as a sled dog in Alaska. In the hard environment, where he is forced to struggle to survive and dominate other canines, he grows increasingly primal and wild. By the end, he has discarded the facade of civilization and is relying on primal instinct and gained experience to emerge as a wild leader.
In the end of The Call of the Wild audiobook, Buck is known as the “Ghost Dog” of the Northland (Alaska and northwest Canada) among other Native Americans. Buck goes to the previous campground where he was last seen with Thornton to grieve his loss on the anniversary of his attack on the Yeehats. Buck exacts revenge on the Yeehats every winter, leading the wolf pack, “as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.”
Buck, The Call of the Wild audiobook‘s protagonist, was a 140-pound St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix who lived happily with Judge Miller in California. However, the gardener’s aide Manuel grabbed him and sold him to the Klondike, where he was forced to work as a sled dog in the harsh Yukon. He later finds a loving owner called John Thornton and becomes feral as he adapts to life in the bush, eventually joining a wolf pack. Thornton is permanently free of humanity after his death and becomes a legend in the Klondike.
Naturalism, the then-fashionable belief that the environment influences character, is present in London. And there’s a lot of muddled Darwinism: London, like many others, has confused evolution with memory, so Buck continues having nightmares about Neanderthals. There’s some obnoxious material about women and minorities, which isn’t really offensive, but you get the impression that if you got him going, it’d be definitive eventually. So you can understand why you have to remind yourself from time to time that The Call of the Wild audiobook is a novel about a dog. It’s about a brave dog who runs across the woods.
“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.”
Indeed, The Call of the Wild audiobook conveys the significance of this work. The actual issue is not one of ethics in relation to animal care, but rather the process of being alienated from one’s inner self. Buck’s intrinsic desire is only for him to be among his own kind. That is what humanity has taken away from him. His inherent impulses are at odds with the servile behavior that has been instilled in him as a result of domestication.
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