從《野性的呼喚》看人與自然的關系
Ⅰ. Jack London and The Call of the Wild
1.1The Introduction of Jack London
John Griffith London (1876-1916) was born in San Francisco of an unmarried mother Flora Wellman. Flora had been stricken by typhus in her girlhood, and afterwards she was unstable if not unbalanced. His father may have been William Chaney, a journalist, lawyer, and major figure in the development of American astrology. Chaney was very strong and had the experience of sailing for many years. He spent much time in writing and reading. Here we can see the influence of heredity on London. He also had a strong build and he loved reading very much. A thirst for knowledge snatched young London and he read every book he could get. London was very ambitious that when reading Ouida’s Signa, a story of an Italian peasant’s rise to glory as a musician, he had the thought that he could also reach his goal by working hard. London inherited the paradoxical characteristics from his mother while he inherited his adventurous nature from his father. He got great interest in adventure and he took any chance to sail and do some risky things. “ In all the exciting and dangerous things, what Jack was mostly interested in was his desire to prove that he was the greatest wandering prince”(Chu Luyuan,1999:50).
London grew up in poverty and worked at various hard laboring jobs, Realizing that he could never become great by doing odd jobs and determined to prepare himself for better than common labor, he attended Oakland High School at age nineteen. There he got known of Mabel, sister of one of his classmates. Mabel became the prototype of Ruth in London’s masterpiece Martin Eden(1909).Always a prolific reader, London consciously chose to become a writer to escape from the horrific prospects of life as a factory worker. He studied other writers and began to submit stories, jokes, and poems to various publications, mostly without success. He also read many philosophical books and his philosophical thoughts were greatly influenced by the four great teachers of him: Darwin, Spencer, Marx and Nietzsche(ibid.99).London believed in Darwin’s evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” and also Nietzsche’s supermanism. These theories were presented in many of his novels.
London was rather disappointed by his failure in getting what he had written published and he was tired of hard work. He didn’t know where to go and how he should succeed then a chance changed his life. “Fate brought him the answer and gold was found in Klondike”(ibid.77). Spending the winter of 1897 in the Yukon provided the metaphorical gold for his first stories. There he got familiar with the northern life and especially with kinds of dogs. The materials he collected there prepared him for the writing of his two famous novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) and his other early works that are a series of short stories called “northern stories”. Most of them are adventurous stories set in a primitive environment and they relive the scene of Klondike gold rush and describe the hard and mysterious life of the god-seekers, their strong will and persistence in fighting with nature, and also a series of conflicts among the fellow men in the wilderness, in the valley and in the huts.#p#分頁標題#e#
1.2The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild is a story about a docile and gentle dog Buck who is kidnapped from the south to the cold and barbaric north. He is cruelly beaten and whipped and is forced to trudge and pull the sledge in the harness. He sees the callous realism between the persons and dogs, the strong and the weak. In order to survive, he becomes ferocious, witty and cunning. Finally, in the call of the wolves in the forest, his wolf nature is aroused and he comes back to the wild. At the beginning, Buck is a very docile domestic dog. But in the process of being sold once and again he endures numerous whips of the masters and worries with the dogs. The wrecked environment makes him intensify his ferity and eliminate the early tractability. Buck not only becomes the leader of the dogs but finally, he answers the call and becomes the head of the wolves in the wild.
Ⅱ.The Relationship Between Human Being and Nature
Buck is the protagonist of our story. Buck is part St. Bernard, part Scotch shepherd. At the beginning of the story, Buck is a domesticated, but atypical dog who lives in the home of Judge Miller in California. After being kidnapped and taken to Alaska to become a sled-dog, Buck's wild nature is reawakened, and he slowly returns to the ways of his ancestors. The Call of the Wild is the masterpiece of Jack London, who is one of the best novelists in the early 20th century in America. The hero and its characters are the main factors to cause the novel perpetual, which embodies the author’s thoughts and ideas. In The Call of the Wild, The dog Buck has a double identity: on the one hand, he is a dog that reminds us of the primitive beast hidden in human’s heart and on the other hand, he is a hero serving as a symbol of all living creatures that have to obey different laws in different environments.
2.1 The Conflictive Relationship
Jack London, In The Call of the Wild, through writes leading character Buck from the civilized return fondness of countryside, elaborated the human and the nature, between the person and animal's conflict. Curly’s death exists in Buck’s mind for a long time. It teaches Buck a lesson that one must not fall down or he will be killed. Buck remembers it well so that he wins when he fights with Spitez for the leadership of the team. During the journey, they have a few times to rest their food “the pound and a half of sun-dried salmon, which was his ration for each day”(London 1981:44is not enough. For Buck “he never had enough, and suffered from perpetual hunger pangs.” (London 1981:44) In order to survive in the environment this “was neither peace, nor rest nor a moment’s safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril” (London 1981:39)Buck keeps on learning and he grows and grows, he has learned to dig hole in snow for sleeping and does well He has learned to steal food from others with out being seen. He does it secretly and cunningly. He does It not because he likes to do but because he is hungry. The instinct of survival makes him do like this. “In short the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.” (London 1981:45)His development proves that he can survive in the fierce condition. The instincts long dead become alive again. The domesticated generation fell from him. From time to time, he dreams of his ancestors, and when he hears the song of the huskies, he is deeply moved.#p#分頁標題#e#
2.1.1 Human Being and Dogs
The gardener’s helper Manuel is in need of money and people in the north are in need of strong dogs, so Buck is sold by the helper. Because he has always been loyal and gentle, when the man gets the rope around his neck, Buck accepts the rope with dignity. A man with a red sweater buys Buck and he deliberately gets Buck wrathful and beats him with a club. Because of lack of experience, Buck knows no caution. Also because he has grown up in a comfortable environment, Buck doesn’t obey the man’s control at first and is beaten heavily. The club introduces him to the reign of the primitive law. He faces the fiercer aspect of life with all the latent cunning of his aroused nature. Finally, when he is smashed down he takes the man with a club as a law-giver and a master to be obeyed. Then Buck is taken to the north and his miserable life begins. He is suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial and works as a sled dog. The dogs and men here are savage and every moment life and limb are in peril so he must be constantly alert because they know no law but the law of club and fang.
In The Call of the Wild, dogs work like machines. It is a monotonous life, operating with machine-like regularity. One day is very like another. Under such toil, Buck soon learns to work and survive. When the dogs are exhausted, fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs will take the place of those worthless for the trail. The worthless ones will be got rid of, and since dogs count for little against dollars, they are to be sold. They can neither know where they will go nor have their own choice. They can do nothing but obey the owners.
Buck is possessed by two men and a woman who know nothing about travel. Then he suffers much and the owners are indifferent and callous to the suffering of the animals. It is the animals’ fate that they can’t choose their owners but are chosen by them. They are helpless before environment and fate.
Buck’s first step to the north is at a dog-buster’s yard. For two days’ suffering on the train, Buck has tolerated a lots. When Buck gets out of the crate, he is in a fierce state and throws himself on a man with a club, but he gets a fatal beaten from the man. Buck understands that “he stood no chance against a man with a club.” ,“a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed.” (London 1981:34)Buck never forgets this rule in his later life and this in his introduction to the reign of primitive law. To his new master, Perrault and Francois, Buck develops no affection for them, but he none the less grows honestly to respect them. He obeys orders and does what he should do, as the book says: “He was too wise to rebel” (London 1981:40) He knows the result if he resists the Liu Fu-qin The Desire for Humanity in The Call of the Wild orders. He learns quickly and easily to pull the sleds, and gradually gets the masters’ trust and carefulness. Francois and Perrault buy Buck and his mates to convey the documents and letters of the government they treat Buck fairly and harshly because “Francois was stern, demanding instant obedience, and by virtue of his whip receiving instant obedience.” (London 1981:40)They look after Buck but not always. When Buck’s feet limps in agony, Francois brings fish to Buck, and “the dog-driver rubbed Buck’s feet for half an hour each night after supper, and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins to make four moccasins for Buck.” (London 1981:53)However, the first night for Buck to live outside in snow-night is difficult because it is bitterly cold. When Buck sees the tent glowing warmly in them isn’t of the white plain, he enters it just as he walks into Judge Miller’s house to get warm by lying by the side of the fireplace, but he is driven out of the tent “Both Perrault and Francois bombarded him with curses and cooking utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fled ignominiously into the outer cold.” (London 1981:41)Buck and his mates pull the heavy sleds day after day, the trail is long and dangerous. They have to worry about whether the ice might be broken, and must defend the attacks of wolves and huskies. Those entire mean that he is gradually breaking away from the civilized world and begins to get used to the new environment Buck and his mates’ performance well but Francois and Perrault leave them. The new master is a Scotch half-breed man. Buck doesn’t like him, but Buck works hard. They pull the sled to convey letters for the gold-seekers. Excessive working makes Buck and his mates exhausted, but they still stick to their post however, when they become extremely weak and have no use, they would be abandoned or killed. The trail is the same and boring. When Buck stops to have a rest the memory of sun-kissed land becomes vague and the picture of his ancestor frequently appears in Buck’s mind. Along the trail the dog-drivers take good care of the dog, when the team get to the destination, the dog can’t walk any more. New dog-team will replace the original one. Buck and his mates are sold again because they are useless and “The worthless ones were to be got ride of and, since dogs count for little against dollars.” (London 1981:75) Charles and Hal buy Buck and his mates. Buck becomes impatient at the long trail He pays no attention to work and has no confidence to his new masters. Hal and Charles know nothing about dog and the north. They treat the dog-team badly and are callous to the suffering of their animals. When they buy the dog-team, the dog has already had not any energy. The only thing they need is to have a good rest but Hal and Charles don’t know it and don’t take advice from others. Both of them whip the dog to start out Hal’s theory, which he practices on the others is that “One must get hardened.” (London 1981:82)He hammers it into the dogs with a club. With the approaching of spring, the ice on the river becomes thin. Buck feels the change, but the dog-drivers don’t they still urge the dogs to go.#p#分頁標題#e#
2.1.2 Human Being and Environment
The end of 19 century, men found gold in the Yukon, all the man were hurrying to north-west Canada to look for gold, and these men wanted big and strong dogs to work in the cold and snow of the north. The massive gold diggers rush originally place of drilling a well mining tranquil wilderness under the desire obligation, at the same time the wanton destruction wilderness and the forest, construct the community, factory district even new cities, they “grab and blaspheme these lands, can’t help saying `give me, give me, give me '” (Wang Yanqing and Yu Xiaojing, The Guide of Jack London’s Works) The Call of the Wild is precisely take this as a background novel, but Hall, Charles, the plum West Lake three people not only have represented civilized own ugliness, also has represented the person and the nature wrong relations. Hall one is the gold digger who goes to a north Koruna generation of gram area from the civilized world, wilderness in their opinion is the money wealth origin naturally, is satisfies their greed the tool. They arrive at when the north wilderness is bringing the useless hunting knife, the pistol, not only this explained that they to the nature, know nothing about to wilderness life, also indicated that they are pose as by the vanquisher, fantasized wholeheartedly defeats the nature. They do not understand to respect the life, they trait dog cruelly and heartlessly, Hall is believes to be more cruel and merciless, uses a stick to beat the dog into heart, to propagandize his theory to his elder sister and brother-in-law, They violate the natural law, knows perfectly well spring arrives, the snow and ice melt, on the river surface ice layer already disrupted, palpitates, but also presumptuously thinks to be able to cross river forcefully. For to natural extremely arrogantly disrespected, finally they pay the life price, a snow first floor have fallen off, all of them fell into the glacier.
2.2 The Harmonious Relationship
The Call of the Wild, through Buck and Miller and Thornton's relations, as well as Buck returns to nature and fuses in nature, Jack London described the harmonious relationship between human being and the nature. In Judge Miller’s place Buck loves its masters and is loyal to them. He plays with Judge Miller’s sons and protects the Judge’s daughters, on the other hand, the Judge and his children also love Buck so that Buck has special position in the family and has advantages over other dogs. He feels “he was king? King over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, human included.”(London 1981:28) Thornton saves Buck from Buck’s misery. He also saves John Thornton’s life twice and he gets used to the new environment and life little by little. Also through the harmonious relations' description, has promulgated the Jake London's ecology viewpoint: Humanity's final home to return to is returns the nature, the human with must maintain naturally the harmonious coexistence the relations.#p#分頁標題#e#
2.2.1 Buck and Judge Miller
At the beginning of the story, Buck is living a comfortable life. He lives in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. He has inherited a strong build from his parents. Good environment and heredity make him royal like a king in this great demesne. Hunting and kindred outdoor delights have kept down the fat and hardened his muscles. In Judge Miller’s place Buck loves its masters and is loyal to them. He plays with Judge Miller’s sons and protects the Judge’s daughters, on the other hand, the Judge and his children also love Buck so that Buck has special position in the family and has advantages over other dogs. He feels “he was king? king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, human included.”(London 1981:28)He is arrogant and trusts in men he knows. Because of this reason he is betrayed by men and sent north as sled-dog. If men didn’t find gold in the north, or if the wages of a gardener’s helper could meet the needs of a wife and numerous progeny, Buck would always be living this good life.
2.2.2 Buck and John Thornton
The Call of the Wild is, first and foremost, the story of Buck’s gradual transformation from a tame beast into a wild animal. But even as the novel celebrates the life of a wild creature, it presents us with the character of John Thornton, whose connection to Buck suggests that there may be something good and natural in the human-dog relationship, despite its flaws. Thornton, a seasoned gold prospector, saves Buck from being beaten to death by the odious Hal and then becomes Buck’s master. From then on, a deep and abiding love blossoms between man and dog. Their relationship is a reciprocal one: Thornton saves Buck, and Buck later saves Thornton from drowning in a river. It is clear that Buck is more of a partner than a servant to the prospector. This mutual respect, we are assured, is characteristic of all Thornton’s relationships to dogs: every one of his animals bears an abiding love for him, which is returned in kind. Even as Buck is increasingly drawn to a life away from humanity, a life in the wild, his affection for Thornton keeps him from making the final break. Indeed, so strong is their bond that it is broken only when Thornton dies, and even then Buck makes an annual pilgrimage to his last master’s final resting place.
Buck’s misery doesn’t come to the end until he is saved by John Thornton, his last and only merciful owner. Then he has changed greatly under another new environment. He saves John Thornton’s life twice and he gets used to the new environment and life little by little.
Thornton’s love, Buck would go back to the wild driven by the environment of the wilderness and also by his heredity. When sitting by the fire at night, he can always hear the call from the wild and recall his ancestors once and again. “So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, whom each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on,…the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again”(London,1981:77). Buck’s love for Thornton grows and grows so he doesn’t answer the call which is always sounding there.#p#分頁標題#e#
Buck wins a wager for Thornton and helps him get a lot of money. So Thornton can pay off his debt and has enough money to go his unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as they have failed. This is an important feature of naturalistic novels. The trail is unknown and the future is limitless. Human beings are helpless before nature. John Thornton asks little of man or nature so Buck is living an unstable life with him. Sometimes they go hungry, sometimes they feast riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting and all is uncertain. Thornton is unafraid of the wild and because of this, he is too self-confident and finally killed by several brutal Indians. Buck’s hope is broken by his beloved owner’s death. Seeing Thornton’s body, Buck’s blood-longing becomes stronger than ever before. “A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head”(ibid.97).At that moment his primitive nature is completely aroused and he becomes a wolf instead of a domestic dog. He immediately and ferociously kills most of the Indians who have killed Thornton for the gold. He is a killer and by virtue of his own strength and prowess, he survives triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive. The Indians think they have got the gold successfully but they are finally killed by Buck. Like all the other people and animals, they can’t know or control their own fate. Since Thornton is dead, that last tie between Buck and human beings is broken.
2.2.3 Buck’s Returning to Nature
The domestic environment makes Buck a good dog once and now the changed environment drives him into the wild where he belongs in the first place. He finally answers the call which is always sounding in the depth of the forest and joins his wolf brothers. Besides environment, heredity also has great influence on Buck. Because his ancestors were wolves living in the wilderness, he always hears the sounding call from the depth of the forest. And chance also plays an important part in changing his fate. He comes to the north because men have found a yellow metal here, and also because the gardener’s helper can’t get the two ends meet. He is rescued by Thornton by chance and for another time his life is changed. Finally, it is also by chance that he is faraway from where they lived chasing a prey that Thornton is killed and then makes him fulfill his de civilization and go back to the wilderness.
in this part, Buck’s vision of primitive man recurs, and this time, he sees himself running alongside the “hairy man,” hunting with him in the forest, and guarding him while he sleeps. In these images, London once again emphasizes the primitive nature of the man-dog relationship and the strength of the bond that ties Buck to John Thornton. But the bond is constantly tested by the equally strong call that draws Buck away from human life and deeper into the wilderness—a call that fills Buck with “a great unrest and strange desires.” As Thornton and his friends sift for gold in the wild, Buck’s soul is in a state of extreme tension, torn between his loyalty to his master and his destiny as a wild animal.#p#分頁標題#e#
His encounter with the timber wolf, whose smallness reminds us of Buck’s remarkable size and power, is an important step in his development as a wild creature, since it offers the promise of a community of wild creatures. Buck need not be alone in the wild; he can find companionship not only from humans and dogs but also in the tight-knit world of the pack. Meanwhile, Buck’s long hunt of the moose enables London to emphasize the importance of what he terms “blood-longing” in Buck; once again, the novel emphasizes the kill-or-be-killed nature of life in the wild and shows us how Buck, the “dominant primordial beast,” is the ultimate killer. “He was a killer,” the novel insists, “a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.” These sentiments are the language of Darwin and Nietzsche, portraying life as an unceasing struggle for survival in which only the strong—only the Bucks of the world—can last for long.
Still, it takes Thornton’s death to enable Buck to enter this wild world fully. For the first time in the novel, he has no master: he has been passed from Judge Miller to the dog traders to Francois to Hal and finally to Thornton. But Thornton’s death ends the succession of masters and leaves him the master of his own fate. The only humans that remain in his world are the Yeehats, and Buck scatters them, triumphantly demonstrating that he is the master, not they. His attack on them marks the final step in his escape from the world of men. Earlier, he learns that humans can be violent, like the man who beats him with the club, and foolish, like Hal, Charles, and Mercedes. After all that has happened in the North, he learns he can kill men at will. The last traces of the old, civilized morality vanish, and Judge Miller’s Buck, who would die for a principle, is transformed into a beast that kills with impunity and without remorse.
London treats this transformation as triumph, not tragedy. Morality functions well in the civilized world, the novel suggests, but Buck’s authentic, animal nature is amoral: it obeys the law of the wild, in which brute strength is the only arbiter of justice. This strength wins the respect of the wolves, which first fight Buck and then obey him; and this strength makes him a legend among the Yeehats. When the novel opens, Buck is a king, but a soft monarch ruling a gentle land obtained only by his birthright. As the novel closes, he is a king again, but his kingdom is a very different place from Judge Miller’s warm Santa Clara spread. More important, he has won his kingdom by his own efforts and nothing else. He is a self-made monarch, having faced a cruel, uncaring world—and mastered it.
Ⅲ. Deep Ecology and Eco-theme in The Call of the Wild#p#分頁標題#e#
3.1 Deep Ecology
The phrase Deep Ecology was coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, and he helped give it a theoretical foundation. "For Arne Naess, ecological science, concerned with facts and logic alone, cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this we need ecological wisdom. Deep ecology seeks to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment. These constitute an interconnected system. Each gives rise to and supports the other, whilst the entire system is, what Naess would call, an ecosophy: an evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony." Naess rejected the idea that beings can be ranked according to their relative value. For example, judgments on whether an animal has an eternal soul, whether it uses reason or whether it has consciousness (or indeed higher consciousness) have all been used to justify the ranking of the human animal as superior to other animals. Naess states that "the right of all forms [of life] to live is an universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species." This metaphysical idea is elucidated in Warwick Fox's claim that we and all other beings are "aspects of a single unfolding reality". (Arne Naess, 1986) As such Deep Ecology would support the view of Aldo Leopold in his book, "A Sand County Almanac" that humans are ‘plain members of the biotic community’. They also would support Leopold's "Land Ethic": "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
Deep ecology offers a philosophical basis for environmental advocacy which may, in turn, guide human activity against perceived self-destruction. Deep ecology and environmentalism hold that the science of ecology shows that ecosystems can absorb only limited change by humans or other dissonant influences. Further, both hold that the actions of modern civilization threaten global ecological well-being. Ecologists have described change and stability in ecological systems in various ways, including homeostasis, dynamic equilibrium, and "flux of nature".(London 1981: 23)Regardless of which model is most accurate, environmentalists citation needed contend that massive human economic activity has pushed the biosphere far from its "natural" state through reduction of biodiversity, climate change, and other influences. As a consequence, civilization is causing mass extinction. Deep ecologists hope to influence social and political change through their philosophy.
The Principles of the Deep Ecology:
Proponents of deep ecology believe that the world does not exist as a resource to be freely exploited by humans. The ethics of deep ecology hold that a whole system is superior to any of its parts. They offer an eight-tier platform to elucidate their claims:#p#分頁標題#e#
The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.
The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.
3. 2 The Eco-theme in The Call of the Wild
“In the last part, In the summers there is one visitor to that valley： a large, golden-brown wolf, larger than any other wolf．He walks alone round the lake where the yellow gold shines in the water, and howls．But he is not always alone．In the long winter nights, he runs at the head of the wolf pack through the moonlight, calling into the night with them, singing a song from a younger world.”
It is not only the songs Buck dedicated to the wilderness, but also the song Jack London dedicated to the natural. This is the memory of the past state of harmonious relationship between human being and nature. Human being and nature is a harmonious group, And in the future, return to nature will be a new state of harmony and unity that human desire and yearning for. Keep a harmonious relationship with nature will be our final destination.
As an animal, Buck's deeds showed that he was the fittest to survive. Buck adapted himself to the environment, so he won his right to survive. Meanwhile, Buck had both wisdom and courage to guarantee his life in the hostile environment.
As a symbol of humanity, Buck's deeds showed that it is cruel and unfair that people live in misery and hunger, and they struggled between death and life.
Human beings not only live among other living beings but also live in a society of human and a society they should keep a good relationship with nature. As socialized human beings, they have sense, and they are restricted by moral restrictions, they should know how to deal with the relationship between human being and nature, so that they should fit the world best. As a socialized human being, people cannot steal or rob or massacre for their own interests as Buck does. Human society is ordered, so human competition must accord with human being’s relationship with nature.#p#分頁標題#e#
3.3The Connection Between Deep Ecology and Eco-theme in The Call of the Wild
Jake London writing naturally by no means paradise, but is real has the fond of the countryside nature; He advocated return naturally also by no means flight from reality, but gets rid of the industry civilized and the scientific principle shackles, gets rid of “the vulgar life” and “the commercial bad habit” (Wang Yanqing and Yu Xiaojing, The Guide of Jack London’s Works), the return simple health existence condition. On the Buck body has reposed the Jake London is right “the lofty fondness of countryside” the hope. The Jake London takes it the strength and US's symbol, has exaggerated the fondness of countryside which on its body glows, eulogizes its kind of development life source “beautifully to have the dignity survival way”. How does the Jake London record by the exquisite writing style narrates Buck to defeat Shi Pizi to win the dog status, how to lead the sled dog team to break the record, how to rescue the master in the turbulent current, how to draw 1000 pound heavy sled, between the lines is containing him to Buck's praising. In the novel’s last part, Jake London descript Buck as which returns to wilderness discloses is praises, is the worship and the expectation. Buck is free in wilderness, unrestrained; It shuttles back and forth in the woods, runs in wilderness; It observes micro-organism's activity, listens respectfully to the bird to sing. Its primitive instinct returned, it catches the chum salmon and the hare, dares with the black bear fight, but also has killed a big pronghorn.“his intelligent, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal, living on a straight meat diet, ha was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, over spelling with vigor and virility…Every part, brain and body, never tissue and fiber, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. His muscles were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and put forth generously over the world ”(London,1981:316) Buck completely was already wild has melted, the simple primitive life, got rid of the civilized winding, has become a perfect wilderness hero. This time's Bucher was precisely the Jake London ideal life form, Buck under foot's wilderness has also represented in the Jake London heart's nature.
The Jake London writing's nature are many and varied the north wilderness most can manifest his natural view. North wilderness cold incomparable, it cannot give the human by to be warm and to be safe, is also not humanity's ideal Garden of Eden, but it has with the civilized world entirely different US which makes one shock. The north wilderness is chaste. Not only because its silver installs the white clothing, not to have the flaw pure white, but because also it compares with the dirty putrefaction’s civilized society appears fresh pure, in such environment, human's soul can obtain the purification. In here, idles lazily, shrinks timidly means the death, if wants to survive not only need through thick and thin, strive for success diligently, moreover needs the people to trust mutually, to cooperate mutually. The north snow wild is fair. The north snow wild is fair. It cold heartless, but it treats impartially to all biology. It is aloof to person's adventures actions, also does not help not to stop; But it is also judge who has a heart of stone, does not stretch the rules, anybody dares to violate its natural law, will receive the severest sanction without one exception. The money has the unwise to underestimate strength in the civilized world, but it actually has no merit to speak in wilderness. In here human and the human is the equality, even the human and the dog are also the equality, which doesn't have to be possible to enjoy the privilege.#p#分頁標題#e#
Bibliography
[1] Arne Naess. Ecology, Community and lifestyle., translated & edited by David Rothenberg. ISBN 0-521-34873-0.
[2] Arne Naess. Thinking Like a Mountain – Towards a council of all beings. John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, ISBN 0-96571-132-1.
