《野性的呼唤》英文书评

A Review of The Call of The WildI About Jack LondonJack London(born Jan. 12, 1876, died Nov. 22, 1916), whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London passed his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. And his experiences of searching for gold in the Klondike (in Canada) left their mark in his stories. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases and drug treatments.Jack London is best known for his books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and a few short stories, such as "To Build a Fire" and "The White Silence." In fact, he was a prolific writer whose fiction explored their geographies and their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the South Pacific. He experimented with many literary forms, from conventional love stories and dystopias (反乌托邦，政治讽刺小说) to science fantasy. His noted journalism included war correspondence, boxing stories, and the life of Molokai lepers. A committed socialist, he insisted against editorial pressures to write political essays and insert social criticism in his fiction. He was among the most influential figures of his day, who understood how to create a public persona and use the media to market his self-created image of poor-boy-turned-success. He left over fifty books of novels, stories, journalism, and essays, many of which have been translated and continue to be read around the world.II PlotBuck is a dog who leads a comfortable life in a California ranch home with his owner, a judge, until he is stolen and sold to pay off a gambling debt. Buck is taken to Alaska and sold to a pair of French Canadians who were impressed with his physique. They train him as a sled dog, and he quickly learns how to survive the cold winter nights and the pack society by observing his teammates. Buck is later sold again and passes hands several times, all the while improving his abilities as a sled dog and pack leader.Eventually, Buck is sold to a man, his wife, and her brother who know nothing about sledding nor surviving in the Alaskan wilderness. They struggle to control the sled and ignore warnings not to travel during the spring melt. As they journey on, they run into John Thornton, an experienced outdoors man, who notices that all of the sled dogs are in terrible shape from the ill treatment of their handlers. Thornton warns the trio against crossing the river, but they refuse to listen and order Buck to mush. Exhausted, starving, and sensing the danger ahead, Buck refuses. Recognizing him as a remarkable dog and disgusted by the driver's beating of the dog, Thornton cuts him free from his traces and tells the trio he's keeping him. After some argument, the trio leaves and tries to cross the river, but as Thornton warned the ice gives way and they drown.As Thornton nurses Buck back to health, Buck comes to love him and grows devoted to him. Thornton takes him on trips to pan for gold. Thornton and his friends go to their camp and continue their search for gold, while Buck begins exploring the wilderness around them and begins socializing with a local wolf pack. One morning, he returns from a three-day long hunt to find his beloved master and the others in the camp have been killed by some Yeehats (Native Americans). Buck finds some of them in the camp and kills them to avenge Thornton, later finding other members of the tribe, then returns to the woods to become alpha wolf (领头狼) of the pack. Each year he revisits the site where Thornton died, never completely forgetting the master he loved.Buck, a powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, lives on Judge Miller’s estate in California’s Santa Clara Valley. He leads a comfortable life there, but it comes to an end when men discover gold in the Klondike region of Canada and a great demand arises for strong dogs to pull sleds. Buck is kidnapped by a gardener on the Miller estate and sold to dog traders, who teach Buck to obey by beating him with a club and, subsequently, ship him north to the Klondike.Arriving in the chilly North, Buck is amazed by the cruelty he sees around him. As soon as another dog from his ship, Curly, gets off the boat, a pack of huskies violently attacks and kills her. Watching her death, Buck vows never to let the same fate befall him. Buck becomes the property of Francois and Perrault, two mail carriers working for the Canadian government, and begins to adjust to life as a sled dog. He recovers the instincts of his wild ancestors: he learns to fight, scavenge for food, and sleep beneath the snow on winter nights. At the same time, he develops a fierce rivalry with Spitz, the lead dog in the team. One of their fights is broken up when a pack of wild dogs invades the camp, but Buck begins to undercut Spitz’s authority, and eventually the two dogs become involved in a major fight. Buck kills Spitz and takes his place as the lead dog.With Buck at the head of the team, Francois and Perrault’s sled m akes record time. However, the men soon turn the team over to a mail carrier who forces the dogs to carry much heavier loads. In the midst of a particularly arduous trip, one of the dogs becomes ill, and eventually the driver has to shoot him. At the end of this journey, the dogs are exhausted, and the mail carrier sells them to a group of American gold hunters—Hal, Charles, and Mercedes.Buck’s new masters are inexperienced and out of place in the wilderness. They overload the sled, beat the dogs, and plan poorly. Halfway through their journey, they begin to run out of food. While the humans bicker, the dogs begin to starve, and the weaker animals soon die. Of an original team of fourteen, only five are still alive when they limp into John Thornton’s camp, still some distance from their destination. Thornton warns them that the ice over which they are traveling is melting and that they may fall through it. Hal dismisses these warnings and tries to get going immediately. The other dogs begin to move, but Buck refuses. When Hal begins to beat him, Thornton intervenes, knocking a knife from Hal’s hand and cutting Buck loose. Hal curses Thornton and starts the sled again, but before they have gone a quarter of a mile, the ice breaks open, swallowing both the humans and the dogs.Thornton becomes Buck’s master, and Buck’s devotion to him is total. He saves Thornton from drowning in a river, attacks a man who tries to start a fight with Thornton in a bar, and, most remarkably, wins a $1,600 wager for his new master by pulling a sled carrying a thousand-pound load. But Buck’s love for Thornton is mixed with a growing attraction to the wild, and he feels as if he is being called away from civilization and into the wilderness. This feeling grows stronger when he accompanies Thornton and his friends in search of a lost mine hidden deep in the Canadian forest.While the men search for gold, Buck ranges far afield, befriending wolves and hunting bears and moose. He always returns to Thornton in the end, until, one day, he comes back to camp to find that Yeehat Indians have attacked and killed his master. Buck attacks the Indians, killing several and scattering the rest, and then heads off into the wild, where he becomes the leader of a pack of wolves. He becomes a legendary figure, a Ghost Dog, fathering countless cubs and inspiring fear in the Yeehats—but every year he returns to the place where Thornton died, to mourn his master before returning to his life in the wild.III My OpinionsThe law of club and fangThrough Buck’s experiences living in the wild, Jack London wants to tell us that the world is dominated by those who are much stronger and more powerful than common people, and only the stronger ones could exist. This is the law of club and fang. Buck gradually realizes the lawand begins to obey the law after he is stolen and taken to the wild. The savage environment which is full of tricks, dangers and deaths turns him to be more powerful and cunning. Finally, he becomes the leader of his team. Similar to the wild, our society becomes crueler and crueler, and living in the society becomes harder and harder. If you want to exist, to have a good life, you should be tough enough to stand the sufferings; you should keep alert, watch and learn; you should make yourself stronger than others. This is the law of living.Loyalty, Honor and LoveThe dogs in the book are all loyal to their masters. For example, a man makes a wager with Thornton over Buck's strength and devotion. Buck wins the bet by breaking a half-ton sled out of the frozen ground, then pulling it 100 yards by himself.In addition, all dogs have sense of honor. They are all proud of being sled dogs, and devote themselves to the work. For example, Dave, who is going to die, still insists on working. “Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks (another dog) in the position he had held and served so long. For the pride of trace and trail was his, and, sick to death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.”Both loyalty and honor are based on love which is what touches medeeply. Because of love to Thornton, Buck does such thing that seems impossible to accomplish. Because of sense of honor, Dave insists on working till he dies.The call of the wildAs we know, Buck answers the call of and returns to the wild finally. In my opinion, the call is not from the wild though Buck often hears the howl of the wolves. Instead, it is from the bottom of Buck’s heart. The call is the will or the instinct which makes him want to be himself: A wolf.I think every one of us has a call in our hearts. The call is our dream, goal or something we really want to do. However, under the pressure of society, we often have to give up our dreams or goals, and do things we are unwilling to do. So we should learn something from Buck: Just follow the call, and be yourself!。