The Wild is still calling

——After reading The Call of The Wild Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is Jack London’s famous novel set during the

Klondike Gold Rush. Its author, Jack London, who had been a prospector in the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s, was regarded as the America’s most famous author at that time.

The novel’s protagonist is a dog named Buck, a physically impressive dog, living the good life in California when he gets stolen and put into dog slavery. For him, this means pulling a ridiculously heavy sled through miles and miles of frozen ice with little or nothing to eat and frequent beatings. As the definition of a domestic dog, Buck is out of his element until he begins to adapt to his surroundings, and learn from the other dogs.

Buck is involved in a struggle for power with another dog, Spitz. They end up fighting and Buck wins, taking over as leader of the sled dog team. The team changes human

management and the new drivers don't seem to be very competent. They’re bad drivers and end up killing everyone, including themselves. Fortunately, Buck is saved by a kind man named John Thornton, moment before the group death in an icy river.

Buck becomes attached to Thornton and even saves his life several times. Buck sets off on a journey with his new master and several other men, loving his new life, except for the need to run off and kill things in the woods every once in a while. Buck fights with

temptation: stay with Thornton, or kill things? Be civilized, or be wild? And naturally there are several missed phone calls from the wild.

At the end of the Call of the Wild, Thornton is killed by the Yeehat tribe. Buck is then free to run with the wild dog packs.

The novel deals with Buck as though he were a person with thoughts and emotions and touches me by its theme of pursuing 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”; rather, Buck gradually “recovers” primitive instincts and memories that his wild ancestors possessed, which have been buried in modern civilized creatures, dogs. The technical term for what happens to Buck is atavism—the reappearance in a modern creature of traits that was defined by its remote forefathers. 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.” 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 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.

Jack London isn’t necessarily making the claim that we should all run around naked,

killing and eating with our bare hands. Instead, he uses a dog to ask the question of what all this civilization is really doing for us. Because aside from the starvation, beatings, and the nearly freezing to death, Buck might just be better off in the wild than where he was before this whole mess began. Why? Because it’s what he was meant to do, what his body was built for. So the next time you find yourself on the verge of giving in to those primal instincts, take a minute. And pick up the phone, because The Wild is still calling.

第二篇：野性的呼唤读书报告

2011级 9班 高梦娜 1101010905

Book report

-----------The Call of the Wild I have read a book named The Call of the Wild. It really impressed me a lot. So I want to make a brief introduction about this book. It’s a story which shows a metamorphosis of a dog named Burk. Burk endured a lot of hardship, and got back to the natural wild environment eventually. This author of this book is named Jack London and it was first published in 1921.

I think because of the author’s living background, the books he wrote were all close to the reality of his life in Alaska. He was a famous and realist writer in America. Buck is a gigantic hybrid dog. He was stolen by a

steward in his host family and the servant sold him to the north on the gold way. From then on, Buck became a labor dog. In the cruel process he gradually realized the justice and the laws of nature. The stressful environment made him know something just like cunning and deceit he didn’t noticed before. He finally established the position of a leading dog. In the hard way of his sledding, he had changed several masters, but he made deep friendship with the last one----Thornton. For Thornton had rescued him from a stupid and stubborn master. Buck fell in love with Thornton had saved his life for many times. Someday Thornton was killed by some barbarians. Although buck revenged through kill some of them, his Thornton would never come back. Then Buck came to the wildness and response the howls which he heard many times. Finally, he became the head of the wolves.

I will make my comprehension about this story into two parts. The first part is the artistic values covered by this

book. Second I will show some enlightenment about this story in my personal opinion.

The artistic values: Buck’s multiple characters in this book such as the firm and indomitable fighting spirits, the strong desire for the new life, the rule of a cunning cruelty, full of love to his master and full of passion for dedication. For examples, in the second chapter, buck learned to dig snow holes to keep him warm; learned to steal pieces of foods to fill his stomach. Those things all showed his suitable and his adaptability for living in a hostile

environment in the life. When it came to the desire for the new life, I surely remembered when Thornton died, Buck responded the forest without hesitation, and it reflected his desire for a new life. He was a dog which achieved his goal by hook or by crook, just like he used his rich imagination and killed the dog named Spitz. Then he became the leader dog and he lead the team broke the record for many times. He was full of love to his master Thornton. When Thornton trialed him and asked him to jump off the cliff; when he bit through the bad man’s throat in a bar; when he saved Thornton from the rapid water; those showed his love to his master.

Jack London said “my story has double properties,

surface is a simple story, any child can read and it was full of plots, change and color. That the following is the real story of philosophy is very complex and full of meaning.” My personal opinions: I think Jack London shaping buck this image was also expressed his heart to alienation of human’s civilization. It was sad and disappointed. At the same time, in the progress of human civilization, the simple nature were more and more far away; the call of the wild also more and more strange to people. The Call of the Wild has a strong romantic color, on the surface

floating composer to natural infinite and howling, and deep it has to fall into the trap of his mining the elegy. Buck broke his last fetter and rushed into the wildness, I realized that only it can truly follow the mysterious call and it has been increasingly alienation of human. I think when the writer described the dog Buck and he endowed with Buck and people of the same emotion and quality. Because Buck understood self-respect, knew the feelings of shy, smart and savvy, good counsel and rich

imagination. Obviously, the writer described the dog’s life on the basis of people’s eyes to observe, to the person’s psychology and ponder to the feelings of person to

understood, all his life experiences with writer’s shadow. I also could realize that the novel is filled with conflicts. In order to survive, Buck had to keep bad natural

environment for struggle. As a settler from other places is a kind of bullying, and there were countless brave, bloody moving. The hungry Eskimo dogs loved fighting each other, and from then, Buck gradually grew from weak to strong.

The works of Jack London created all had dramatic plots. I loved that very much. He always put his characters into extreme hash and vital circumstances. Because of this writing technique, he could show the profound human nature, the most real character. Jack London praised courage, determination and love. Those were human noble quality, so he could get the heart attacks from his sincerely readers. I could find the relationships between dogs and humans, and the attitude people towards the dogs changed throughout the whole story. But when I watched Buck’s all life, he never got the respect and real love from human. I believed that the writer wrote the story through Buck to reflect human life and behaviors just like good or evil. He revealed the beauty and ugliness in details. In the surface, this story was only a plaintive

animal wail. In the essence this story was the voice of human which contains the emotions between animals and human beings.

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: people living in this world are ready to death, practice death, because death can make our body disappear. And in the famous book Forrest Gump, Gump’s mother told him, death is a part of life, when she was dying. I knew more things about death. Through this excellent story I could get the awareness of myself in the whole world. I was really enjoyed the moment when I read it.