716 London, Jack
the man tells him “you’ve learned your place, and
I know mine. . . . fearlessly pat[ting]” Buck on the
head. The club is “a revelation” to Buck, for it teaches
him a “lesson . . . [that] in all his after life he never
forgot. . . . It was his introduction to the reign of
primitive law. . . . [that] a man with a club was a
lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not neces-
sarily conciliated.” This particular tool, above all the
others, effectively signifies his loss of freedom and its
replacement with obedience to humans.
After being assigned to a sled dog team, Buck
notices that another tool, the harness, has a regula-
tory effect on all the dogs, “utterly transform[ing]”
the pack into “new dogs” and focused beings, “the
toil of the traces [becoming] . . . all that they lived
for.” These tools of oppression and degradation, but
especially the club, thus collectively teach Buck to
accept his new station and lack of freedom. As a
sled dog member, he is locked “in the struggle for
mastery” against all men with tools.
Throughout the novel, London consistently
stresses the importance of who is mastering whom,
a hierarchy that involves even the dog pack. Feel-
ing that leadership “was his by right,” and desiring
it more than escaping a clubbing, Buck ascends to
pack leadership. And he excels at it, in that he excels
“in giving the law and making his mates live up to
it”—in essence, constraining their freedom. Buck
thus recovers some of his freedom by circumscrib-
ing or controlling others. He has indeed learned the
lesson well.
Nature also limits Buck’s freedom. It constantly
calls to him, a hypnotic lure that constricts his lov-
ing friendship with John Thornton. Nature’s unre-
lenting siren call traps him in the uncomfortable
position of having to choose between Thornton and
a life in the wild. His decision not to choose until
Thornton dies—to let fate decide—reinforces his
dependent condition. Furthermore, nature’s primary
lesson, that a being “must master or be mastered”
to survive, only reinscribes an unequal system of
power relations. Thus when Buck gains his free-
dom after Thornton’s death, his escape into nature
requires him both to heed the “call” of the wild and
its tenet to “kill or be killed”—leaving him subject
to another law, if not the law of the club anymore.
Lori Vermaas
identity in The Call of the Wild
Before his capture, Buck was confident in his iden-
tity as “king,—king over all . . . humans included” at
Judge Miller’s place, “a sated aristocrat” and “country
gentleman” who “stalked imperiously.” After being
kidnapped in California and sold as a working dog
in Alaska, however, he is thrown into a whirlwind
of experiences, all of which convolute his sense of
who he is and even who he thought he was. Caged,
he turns into a “raging fiend,” “so changed . . . that
the Judge himself would not have recognized him.”
His enslavement precipitates his devolution into a
primordial animal, one who eats much more quickly,
never shows weakness, and steals. As a result, his
body changes: “his muscles . . . hard as iron.”
Buck’s gradual change into a more primitive
being sets him on a path of self-discovery, for it
connects him to an entirely new, yet eerily familiar
part of his self-identity. It stimulates responses that
feel frightening to him “without effort or discovery,”
particularly the desire to kill. While helping his pack
to track and kill a snowshoe hare, he realizes that
the urge came to him “with a sense of familiarity.
He seemed to remember it all,” the “old instincts . .
to kill things . . . the blood lust, the joy to kill. . . .
was nothing new or strange, this scene of old time.
It was as though it had always been, the wonted way
of things.” Buck’s close connection to these dormant,
“long dead” ancestral memories of primitive exis-
tence soon manifest spiritually, especially when he
sits near the campfire, where he is able to meditate
and sleep and dream back in time to “memories of
his heredity.” He time travels in these slumbers, vis-
iting past lives and primitive companions who are all
unrecognizable, yet nevertheless possess “a seeming
familiarity.”
Regardless of Buck’s embrace of the primitive in
himself, he struggles with these changes, particularly
when he meets John Thornton. Although by now
Buck is a significantly transformed dog, whose phys-
ical prowess and instinctual shrewdness intimidate
Thornton’s men, under Thornton’s guardianship he
enters a more emotional existence or identity, in that
he discovers love for the first time. Thornton had
saved his life, so Buck is very much devoted to him.
The time he spends in his camp reawakens memo-
ries of his former life as a domesticated dog, which