The Theme of the Double in The Call of the Wild

John S. Mann Dogs and men are fundamentally alike in the Klondike world of Jack London's The Call of the Wild: "There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang." Dogs and men answer the call of their savage natures and their terrifying environment in a violent, bloody, and continual struggle for survival. The primitive fears and desires which surface in Buck--the splendid animal on whom the story centers--also control his human masters. London describes the dog's "development"--his regression to instinct--in terms of human personality and action, so that by the end of the tale Buck emerges as a fullyrealized "character" whose motivation can be thoroughly understood. The Call of the Wild remains, curiously, a dog story made humanly understandable: it is a story of the "transformations" that a dog undergoes in the development of a new identity. London patterns the relationships between dogs and humans with special care, and they strike the reader with clarity and richness. In part this justifies one's discovery in the story of a controlling metaphor, a theme, usually applied to a peculiar facet of human character. The theme of the "double" in fact illuminates The Call of the Wild in several important ways, offering focus for revelations about Buck and his human masters alike. The double as theme, as idea, as complex symbology provides a radiant metaphorical center for the whole landscape of Buck's tale. It encompasses character--the presentations of Buck, men and other dogs, and their necessary relations--but it also touches the action, the points of view involved in the telling of the story, and its atmosphere and setting in significant ways. Doubles and "doubling" themselves become controlling, almost obsessive preoccupations in London's narrative. Accordingly, a consideration of the double can help to account for the fascination the book has had for readers in the seventy-odd years since its publication in July, 1903. It can also suggest ways in which the book, surely one of London's best, is worthy of continued serious critical attention.... If the theme of the double usually depicts men as deeply divided within themselves, at war with their own natures and with their surroundings, then its first manifestation [in The Call Of the Wild] is in the opposing values, the polar attractions, of civilized and uncivilized worlds at work on the consciousness of a dog. The story develops through the impact of Buck's new Klondike environment upon his habits and expectations, conditioned as they are by his four-year sojourn in the civilized Santa Clara Valley of California. The logic of Buck's experience is to drive him increasingly, dramatically into the wild, so that even the interruption of this process by the civilizing love of John Thornton is not enough to return him to men and civilization. London called the process "the devolution or decivilization of a dog." Buck's first theft of food from the government courier Perrault early in the book marks "the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence." Stealing food helps Buck stay alive, and the narrator remarks that "the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and so save his hide." The remainder of the story parallels the outer conflict between Buck and his new Klondike environment with the inner conflict between the savage character of his buried nature and the patterns of conduct imposed on that nature by civilized society. Like the chief character in O'Neill's Emperor Jones, Buck faces experiences that force "instincts long dead [to become] alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him." London dramatizes this split between civilization and savagery in several interesting ways, each involving a kind of double in turn. Though he once commented that "God abhors a mongrel," he carefully

states that Buck is of mixed breed--half St. Bernard and half Scotch shepherd. This racial split in Buck's physical nature shrewdly underscores the inner conflict between civilized values and their opposites. More important in defining the antithetical parts of Buck's nature is London's constant use of images of war throughout the book. Civilization and savagery fight a "war" inside Buck; much of Chapter Three chronicles the "secret growth" of the "dominant primordial beast" within him. Marks of war are everywhere in the plot of The Call of the Wild: in the huskies' savage killing of the Newfoundland, Curly; in the fight of Buck's team with a pack of starving huskies; in the constant fighting among the dogs on the team; in the murder of John Thornton and his partner by marauding Yeehat Indians; in Buck's battle with the wolf pack at the end of the book. Buck fights a literal war with his rival Spitz, first as a rebellious underling deposing the leader of the dog team, and later in a significant affirmation of his savage inheritance: In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death. As they circled about, snarling, ears laid back, keenly watchful for the advantage, the scene came to Buck with a sense of familiarity. He seemed to remember it all,--the white woods, and earth, and moonlight, and the thrill of battle. Over the whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly calm.... To Buck it was nothing new or strange, this scene of old time. It was as though it had always been, the wonted way of things. The war between Buck and Spitz provides London with one of his clearest metaphors for Darwinian struggle and survival. The taste of Spitz's blood remains with Buck, drawn back and waiting for the other dogs to finish off the wounded rival: "Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good." Francois, the team driver, notices the change in Buck the next day in a significant phrase: "`Eh? Wot I say? I spik true w'en I say day Buck two devils!'" As if in confirmation of that statement, London further dramatizes the theme of the double in an explicit set of controlling oppositions. Each of these projects Buck's inner and outer conflicts in things of opposite value. The original opposition between civilization and the wild encompasses all the others. The civilized world of the Southland, described continually in the book as warm, soft and easy, is opposed to the wild Northland, a terrifying arena of cold, hard brutality and sudden, violent death which yet--in London's most intriguing paradox--is finally seen as life-giving for the transformed Buck. The human world of ethical impulse and civilizing sanctions against violence is placed against the savage world of animals and savage men. More civilized dogs like Newfoundlands and even huskies find primitive counterparts in the wolves whose howl at the end of the story is the very sound of the wild. Less obviously, London "doubles" the story into opposing worlds. Buck begins in the waking world of reality and ends in a silent, white wasteland which is 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 is a survival built on the death of other living creatures. Between these opposing worlds and 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 is 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 through him--the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It was a token that he was harking back through his own life to the lives of his forbears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly civilized dog, and of his own experience knew no trap and so could not of himself fear it. The muscles of his whole body contracted spasmodically and instinctively, the hair on his neck and shoulders stood on end, and with a ferocious snarl he bounded straight up into the blinding day, the snow flying about him in a flashing cloud. The alluring world of snow and silence remains no less a tomb at the end of the book; though Buck is able to respond to it and still survive, John Thornton cannot. It is impossible to view such doubled worlds and values, such connected oppositions, for very long without returning to London's pairing of dogs and humans with a renewed sense of its interest and complexity. Both Maxwell Geismar and Charles Child Walcutt have pointed to London's skill in keeping the story within an animal point of view while retaining for balance and proportion a wise degree of human perspective. In fact, The Call of the Wild does retain a double point of view throughout, and London's cunning alternation of dog and human perspectives becomes the essential mark of his craft in the story. London often maintains the two points of view simultaneously; the impact of the double perspective on the reader makes it worthwhile to follow its development more closely in the action of the book. The relations between Buck and the humans he encounters are marked, not surprisingly, by opposing forces, actions, roles, or values: love and hate, master and slave, uneasy truce and open war, hunter and victim. Buck enters the story in his sustaining California environment as ruler of all he surveys: he is "king,--king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller's place, humans included." Taken out of that happy valley, he is starved and mistreated by his captors and then subdued by the brutal club of a shrewd, red-sweatered man. The man conquers Buck and Buck hates him; yet the beating brings with it the curiously ambiguous relation between master and slave: "When the man brought him water he drank eagerly, and later bolted a generous meal of raw meat, chunk by chunk, from the man's hand." Buck's understanding of human beings will hence forth be defined by power and the politic dispensing of the necessities of life. The next three chapters bring Buck under the benevolent tutelage of Perrault and Francois, masters still, but fair and, above all, schooled in the ways of the North. Buck's own competence increases apace. Though life on the trail is hard, Buck finds increasing joy in work. Humans and dogs grow markedly together: the trail demands teamwork from both. As humans and dogs form a cohesive unit, however, Buck begins fighting the other animals. His struggle for mastery in fact replays his own battle with the redsweatered man; at the end of Chapter Three he mortally wounds Spitz and, though slave of humans, becomes master of the team. He retains this mastery though most of Chapter Four ("Who Has Won To Mastership") and leads a record run to Dawson and back; he continues to lead through Chapter Five, in spite of new owners and the increasing fatigue of endless trips from the coast to the interior. This curious sharing of human and animal points of view and roles receives added point in Chapter Five in the interpolated fable of Charles, Hal, and Mercedes. Theirs is the fate of incompetence, weakness, and the failure to rid themselves fast enough of Southland, civilized values; the reader hates them because they mistreat the dogs through ignorance and kill off all but a few. London's manipulation of his readers' sympathy here suggests the way human and canine perspectives begin to fuse in the Klondike and foreshadows the end of the story. Buck can make it; the humans cannot: "By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance,

Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood." The appearance of John Thornton in Buck's life seems the signal for more human values--chiefly love--to mitigate the severity of Buck's previous experience. Yet once again the double remains a controlling presence. John Thornton's initial response in saving Buck is that of an animal: "And then suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon the man who wielded the club." Buck responds in turn with a human emotion in Chapter Six: "Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time." Though London uses words like "adoration" and "madness," he makes it clear that Thornton is "the ideal master." Buck has become a loveslave, the reverse of his relationship to the red-sweatered man. Remarkably, Buck and Thornton grow alike, almost exchange roles. For example, Thornton begins to talk to Buck; and a "miners' meeting" absolves Buck of guilt, as though he were a human on trial, in an incident at Circle City in which he defends Thornton from "`Black Burton'." Buck gains increasing "fame" in the Klondike, adopts traditional dog roles in saving Thornton's life and in winning a $1600 bet for his master with an amazing feat of strength. Thornton is murdered, and Buck avenges his death. At the end of the story, however, he has become least civilized, most open to the wolf's howl which gains his final allegiance. Love for a human master co-exists with primal savagery, each paradoxically intensifying the other. Thus London develops his intricate system of relations between humans and dogs through a series of double impulses and actions: fusions and separations, loves and hates, adoptions and rejections. The tale's action meanwhile drives Buck more deeply into the wild. This double perspective becomes the craft of the book. In process, it gives us the action of The Call of the Wild while it symbolically restates its major themes. In the latter part of the book, atmosphere, setting, landscape become all-important; and they, too, reflect the theme of the double. Writing to his young friend Cloudesley Johns in 1900, London had commented on the importance of atmosphere in terms curiously reminiscent of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition": "Atmosphere stands always for the elimination of the artist, that is to say, the atmosphere is the artist; and when there is no atmosphere and the artist is yet there, it simply means that the machinery is creaking and that the reader hears it." Practically, London did not "eliminate" himself from The Call of the Wild--indeed he could not--though he solves the problem of atmosphere wonderfully in the story. As Buck's journey to the Klondike separates him from the civilized life of the Southland, so the sledruns from the seacoast to the interior cross a "divide" that separates men from the wild. In Chapter Two, London introduces this divide as a major feature of the Klondike landscape: "It was a hard day's run, up the Caon, through Sheep Camp, past the Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the salt water and the fresh and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely North." Divides like this recur throughout the book, and each time Buck crosses one, he enters a world whose constituent parts are silence, wildness, an increasingly nonhuman void--whatever is opposite to the world he has left. In the last chapter, Buck, Thornton, and two other men enter more deeply the "uncharted vastness": They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life--only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.

Here, London emphasizes the "divide" with striking clarity in paradoxes like "summer blizzards" and "midnight suns," in the rapid crossings into new seasons and landscapes, and in the sense that the interior of the North is a closed country which must be "penetrated." Earle Labor has described this interior wilderness of the North in one of London's own metaphors and, following one of his own story titles as the "White Silence," emphasizes its inviolability and austere force in opposition to man's puny insignificance. The landscape, the setting of the tale, its atmosphere--all become increasingly charged with symbolic and psychological meaning, so that the "divide" crossed in Buck's journey is one of interior character and world as well as outer reality. Buck journeys from the waking world into its double, the world of dream. As early as Chapter Four, Buck begins dreaming by the campfire of a "hairy man" in an older world, a human companion and double evoked by instinct and heredity from the depths of his consciousness. Buck dreams increasingly as the story continues: he dream of "shades" of older dogs and wolves and even becomes the hairy man's shadow-companion and equal in dream-visions of hunt and escape in a primitive time. Even the humans seem affected at the end of the book. Thornton and the others journey "into the East after a fabled lost mine"; their discovery of gold seems to bring them into another world than the waking one: "Like giants they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped the treasure up." Buck has been moving toward this dream-world double of the waking world throughout the book. He "enters" it in consciousness as well as in unconsciousness several times and then suddenly, literally, at the end. What Buck journeys toward is the instinctual life, the buried life within. All of these things are recapitulated and intensified in the stunning last chapter of The Call of the Wild, where the theme of the double develops with special clarity. The logic of "The Sounding of the Call" is dream-logic, even though the action remains entirely compelling in its effort to move Buck completely, finally from the world of men to the world of natural creatures. Buck's experience has already made him "older," drawn him closer to natural, not human, rhythms: "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." He meets his dream-companion, the hairy man who "heard and smelled as cleanly as Buck," as an equal in a world behind and within the present waking world. His meetings with this human double closely parallel the "call" he hears with greater and greater frequency from "the depths of the forest." He begins to respond to "irresistible impulses." Suddenly, one night, he slips out of camp to encounter a timber wolf, a literal double. They run together, cross a "bleak divide," a "watershed," into a new country: "Buck was wildly glad. He knew at last he was answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows." This encounter with Buck's literal double destroys the precarious balance between the civilized and primitive qualities of Buck's nature. He becomes a skilled hunter and kills a large black bear. As the "blood longing" grows he begins to look more and more like a wolf. He remains "haunted by recollections of the wild brother, and of the smiling land beyond the divide and the run side by side through the wide forest stretches." He leaves camp, humans, and fire each night to undergo an "instant and terrible transformation" like some woodland Jekyll-Hyde. In an epic chase and battle taking him miles and days away from Thornton, he kills a moose, highest and strongest of Klondike animals. After each hunt, however, he returns, so that the action of the chapter displays a doubling, a shifting back and forth between the world of John Thornton's human love for Buck and the world of the forest and his wild wolf-brother. He returns from the moose hunt to find John Thornton dead. Thornton's admirable simplicity and

competence contain one flaw, which London states early in the final chapter: "He was unafraid of the wild." His fate remains, in James I. McClintock's rewarding suggestion, "the tragedy of youthful, energetic protagonists testing their vitality against the brutal forces of nature only to be drawn catastrophically toward the demonic, the irrational and death-dealing." Buck does not make the same mistake; because he apprehends the wild, he can turn it to his advantage in slaughtering Thornton's Yeehat murderers. The Yeehat bodies lie as nothing more than animal "carcasses," the remains of "the noblest game of all." With Thornton's death and in killing his first men, Buck moves irrevocably into the wild: "John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him." The tone of the last chapter has meanwhile been shifting subtly. London's prose begins to sound more lyric, evocative, dream-like, idyllic. As Buck pursues the "call," be "would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or in the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells...." His senses are more and more tuned to nature itself, so that he can feel that "change was coming over the face of things": He could feel a new stir in the land. As the moose were coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in. Forest and stream and air seemed palpitant with their presence. The news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or smell, but by some other and subtler sense. When he encounters and subdues the wolf pack, it is with all the natural, non-human sanction that London's prose can command. Then, suddenly, the dog Buck enters the realm of myth and the story ends. He leads the pack and becomes a kind of Ur-dog: he changes the timber wolf breed by siring a whole race of dogs mixed like him. He persists, in the legends of the Yeehats, as a "Ghost Dog" who haunts their camps and hunting grounds. In the last four paragraphs London fuses Buck totally with the natural world, so worlds and seasons sing through his final wolf howl. The song has now become "a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack." Running along the snow under the pale moonlight and flaming aurora borealis, Buck becomes a vision, an incarnation. Perhaps London's evocation of the natural world of the North lends the special, feral grace to the prose of The Call of the Wild . In any case, it aids his development of the theme of the double in the consciousness of a dog--the working out of individual action amidst the conflict and final transformation of the divided self. Joan London may be right in suggesting that her father's trip to the East End London slums so horrified him that he fled in Buck's story "to a world of his own devising, a clean, beautiful, primitive world in which ... the fit, be they man or beast, could and would survive." Yet attempts to make Buck solely a human character in a social allegory remain curiously unproductive. The identity which Buck affirms is the product of the doubled values, landscapes, actions, and psychological impulses in the story, not of abstract notions about existing social reality. The "choice" Buck makes has, moreover, a peculiar attraction for London himself: 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. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a chain of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him in the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and

of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move. The metaphors of this passage (from Chapter Three) summarize the doubling impulses of the story in their paradoxical connections of life and dead matter, old and young worlds, the human reality of things and the timeless world of nature and race memory. The energy of the passage suggests London's primary achievement in The Call of the Wild : he discovered an action and a character that would elevate the savage world of Darwin to the pure and terrible world of myth. (Source: John S. Mann, "The Theme of the Double in The Call of the Wild," in The Markham Review, Vol. 8, Fall, 1978.)

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Context Plot Overview Character List Analysis of Major Characters Themes, Motifs & Symbols Summary & Analysis o Chapter I: Into the Primitive o Chapter II: The Law of Club and Fang o Chapter III: The Dominant Primordial Beast o Chapter IV: Who Has Won to Mastership o Chapter V: The Toil of Trace and Trail o Chapter VI: For the Love of a Man o Chapter VII: The Sounding of the Call Important Quotations Explained Key Facts Study Questions & Essay Topics Quiz Suggestions for Further Reading How to Cite This SparkNote

The Call of the Wild

Jack London

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Character List
Buck - A powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, who is stolen from a California estate and sold as a sled dog in the Arctic. Buck gradually evolves from a pampered pet into a fierce, masterful animal, able to hold his own in the cruel, kill-or-be-killed world of the North. Though he loves his final master, John Thornton, he feels the wild calling him away from civilization and longs to reconnect with the primitive roots of his species. Read an in-depth analysis of Buck. John Thornton - Bucks final master, a gold hunter experienced in the ways of the Klondike. Thornton saves Buck from death at the hands of Hal, and Buck rewards Thornton with fierce loyalty. Thorntons relationship to Buck is the ideal man-dog relationship: each guards the others back and is completely devoted to the other. The strength of their bond is enough to keep Buck from acting on the forces he feels are calling him into the wild. Read an in-depth analysis of John Thornton. Spitz - Bucks archrival and the original leader of Francoiss dog team. Spitz is a fierce animala devil-dog, one man calls himwho is used to fighting with other dogs and winning. He meets his match in Buck, however, who is as strong as Spitz and possesses more cunning. Spitz is an amoral being who fights for survival with all of his might, disregarding what is right and wrong. Francois - A French Canadian mail driver who buys Buck and adds him to his team. Francois is an experienced man, accustomed to life in the North, and he impresses Buck with his fairness and good sense. Perrault - A French Canadian who, together with Francois, turns Buck into a sled dog for the Canadian government. Both Perrault and Francois speak in heavily accented English, which London distinguishes from the rest of the novels dialogue. Hal - An American gold seeker, Hal comes to Canada with his sister, Mercedes, and her husband, Charles, in search of adventure and riches. The three buy Buck and his team and try to drive them, but their inexperience makes them terrible masters, as they run out of food during the journey and bicker among themselves. Hal and his companions are meant to represent the weakness of overcivilized men and to embody the man-dog relationship at its worst. Read an in-depth analysis of Hal. Mercedes - Charless wife and Hals sister. Mercedes is spoiled and pampered, and her unreasonable demands slow her, Hal, and Charles on their journey and contribute to its disastrous ending. Her civilized manner, however, contrasts that of her unprepared brother

and husband in that she initially feels sympathetic for the worn-out sled team. Her behavior, London suggests, demonstrates how civilized women are unsuited for life in the wild, having been spoiled and babied by the men around them. Read an in-depth analysis of Mercedes. Charles - Hals brother-in-law and Mercedes husband. Charles shares their inexperience and folly. Read an in-depth analysis of Charles. Dave - A dog on Bucks team. Dave becomes ill on one of the teams journeys but refuses to leave the harness, preferring to die pulling the sled. In his stubbornness at this task, Dave is an example of gritty determination. Sol-leks - An older, more experienced dog on Bucks team. Curly - A friend of Bucks, met on the journey to the North. Curlys death, when she naively tries to be friendly to a husky, acts as a warning to Buck of the harshness and cruelty of his new home. Judge Miller - Bucks original master, the owner of a large estate in Californias Santa Clara Valley. Manuel - A gardeners helper on Judge Millers estate. Manuel kidnaps Buck and sells him in order to pay off his gambling debts. < Previous Section Plot Overview Next Section > Analysis of Major Characters

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