5 paragraph essay call of the wild
Anthropomorphism is one of the primary literary techniques used by Jack London in The Call of the Wild. How was London able to use this technique to express his ideas about human as well as canine nature? Explain how the beginning of The Call of the Wild illustrates the idea of "survival of the fittest". Use examples from the text to justify your answer. How does Buck feel about the man in the red sweater? Is he supposed to be a negative character?
Call of the Wild Essay Questions
SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace or teach! Find out more. Buck, a powerful dog, half St. 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. Buck kills Spitz and takes his place as the lead dog. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
Artboard Created with Sketch. Error Created with Sketch. Themes Motifs Symbols Key Facts. Summary Plot Overview. Next section Chapter I: Into the Primitive. Popular pages: The Call of the Wild. Take a Study Break.
Free Essay: The Call of the Wild The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is a classic piece of American literature. The novel Of The Wild. Words | 5 Pages. Of an original team of fourteen, only five dogs including Buck survived when they limped into John Thornton's camp. Then Thornton warns them that the ice over.
This lesson will fill you in on these themes, help with understanding the storyline, and offer a few questions to test your comprehension. Born in , he drew inspiration for his work as a novelist and journalist from his early life experiences in poverty, as a sailor. Wouldn't it be crazy if a domesticated dog retrogressed into a wild animal and became part of a wolf pack? The novel tells about a domesticated dog from California, Buck, who retrogressed into a primitive wolf. He had never even saw snow!
SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace or teach!
This lesson will fill you in on these themes, help with understanding the storyline, and offer a few questions to test your comprehension. Born in , he drew inspiration for his work as a novelist and journalist from his early life experiences in poverty, as a sailor.
Call of the Wild Essay on Main Themes
SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace or teach! Find out more. A powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, who is stolen from a California estate and sold as a sled dog in the Arctic. Buck gradually evolves from a pampered pet into a fierce, masterful animal, able to hold his own in the cruel, kill-or-be-killed world of the North.
The Call of the Wild
Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Log in or Sign up. Jack London's The Call of the Wild tells the incredible story of a dog named Buck, kidnapped from a comfortable life in California and sold to be part of a dog sled team in during the Klondike Gold Rush. He travels hundreds of miles across the Yukon, Canada, with two men, Francois and Perrault. One of the other dogs named Spitz, the team leader, becomes Buck's enemy. In order to survive, Buck becomes less like a pet and more like a wild dog. There were no roads and no electricity, and the group traveled by sled through ice and snow. At night, they camped out in the snow. Danger was always waiting around the corner.
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We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. In , Jack London wrote his best selling novel, concerning the life of a sled dog that travels throughout Alaska, the Yukon, and the Klondike. Throughout this book Jack London uses personification to illustrate the dogs viewpoint. London describes what adventures the dog encounters after being kidnapped from his Santa Clara Valley home to be taken to Alaska as a sled dog to help men pursue gold in the gold rush of
Call Of The Wild Essay
Jack London believed in Herbert Spencer's theory of "survival of the fittest," which means basically that an organism or group that is better suited to an environment will have a better chance for survival than an animal or group that is less suited. In other words, Spencer suggested that learning did not play a great role in the survival of a species. More often it had to do with luck -- a major environmental change would suddenly make one group of organisms better off than it had been before, and they would therefore live longer and reproduce more. London clearly makes use of the idea of "survival of the fittest" in The Call of the Wild. By chance, Buck 's environment undergoes a tremendous change - he is kidnapped and taken from a "sun-kissed," easy existence to the wilds of the Klondike. Buck survives because he was genetically more suited to that environment than many of the other dogs who were there. He did not need to learn much of anything - the instincts for survival were handed down by his ancestors -- a more poetic version of genetic inheritance. London takes the idea even more literally than is necessary. If Buck had remained in Santa Clara, he would not have passed on his genetic traits, for there were no suitable mates available to him. At the end of The Call of the Wild it reads that "the years were not many when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a rift of white centered down the chest. For the first time there was a scientific theory, which suggested that human beings as well as animals have natural instincts which are merely things passed down through the genetic code.
The Call of the Wild Chapter 3 Summary & Quotes
Locate passages from the book and show where the comparison and contrast is located by using the page number. Put the page in parentheses. These passages will be the sentences used as quotes to support your thoughts about the characters. Please be very thorough. Thank you. Excerpt From Essay :. They essay can be on anything, I was thinking it could maybe focus on the themes of Survival and Man vs Wild.
