User talk:J.P.S.C.

The Call of the Wild: The Dominant Primordial Beast

In Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Buck starts out living at “a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley.” ,(p.1),  a place where the house itself was as big as a king’s summer retreat. In this civilized world “Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole world was his.” “For he was king,-- king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans included.” (p.2) Buck was the Dominant Primordial Beast. In other words, he is the symbol of what it is to be a prevailing natural creature. No matter what environment he is in he maintained his nobility except for when he was with the man in the man in the red sweater.

Buck even maintains his nobility in captivity; his spirit is never broken. He always challenged new authority even after being moved from the train to a little shed in back of a saloon, to an express office, to a railway depot, to an express car on a locomotive, to a wagon, then finally to a “high-walled back yard”(p.5). After two days and nights without food or water and then a fever, he still “launched his one hundred and forty pounds of fury, supercharged with the pent passion of two days and nights.”,(p.6), at the man in the red sweater. However even though he was “supercharged” he was still beaten down by this new revelation, the club. Even though beaten, he didn’t faun on the man in the red sweater; he did, however, eat right out of the man’s hand, literally, so he loses a little self-respect.

Buck has been taught the law of the club by the man in the red sweater, but he learns the law of the fang from the unfortunate demise of Curly. The beast in the Dominant Primordial Beast must learn to follow the law of the club and the fang. By now Buck is in the care of the French-Canadians. He starts out not even knowing how to sleep. He goes from tent to tent being chased out ether by dog or by man, but he eventually finds out that to sleep one must dig a hole in the snow and curl up. Now he is sleeping like a wolf, so therefore more primordial. Soon he was to receive a new shock. He was strapped to the sled hauling lumber; this of course did not please his majesty, but he was to learn that his pride was not all that important; shortly afterward he “Buckled down and did his best, though all was new and strange.” (p. 11)

Buck is now well on his way on being the Dominant Primordial Beast (DPB) but he is still missing one thing, leadership. But before one becomes a leader one must learn to be one. Buck now has to win over the support of the pack (the dog sled team). First he tries to stop Spitz from punishing the “many times offending Pike”, (p.24), for not showing up in the morning to pull the sled. This is the first instance of Buck challenging Spits’ authority. By stopping Spitz from punishing the others he gains the support of the other dogs. As Buck is inciting this chaos, he is becoming more dominant. “This braking down of discipline likewise affected the dogs in their relations with one another.”(P.26); they not only fought with Spitz but also with all the other dogs. Buck must now kill the alpha dog, Spitz, to become very close to being the DPB. Buck and the pack and about fifty other huskies chase a rabbit. Spitz cuts a corner and gets in front of the rabbit; he then kills the rabbit. This sets off Buck, who then attacks Spitz; after a long show down where some cuts are inflicted, Buck breaks one of Spitz’s legs, then shortly afterwards, Buck breaks Spitz’s other front leg. He then knocks Spitz over. Spitz is jumped on by all of the other huskies who tear him to pieces. Buck is now “The dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good” (p.29). Throughout Ch. 1-3 Buck changes from pampered to hard working and always thinking. Nevertheless Buck is not completely the DPB because he still has a master, and until he has no master, save instinct, he will not be the complete DPB. Patrick (talk) 21:59, 25 January 2008 (UTC)