Jack London�s Apparent Conflic
In history, many extraordinary authors have written about struggles among two or more forces. Even in the earliest times, Homer, one of history�s greatest writer and philosophers, has written such pieces as The Odyssey, the fable of a common man who challenges elements he has no control over, and successfully overcomes them to achieve glory. Jack London, while a great philosopher in his own way, does not write about common mortal men overcoming fate, but instead focuses on many different categories of struggles, including man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus society. Examples of London�s intertwining of struggles can be seen in such stories as White Fang, The Call of the ...
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was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. His years in the Klondike searching for gold left their mark in his best short stories; among them, The Call of the Wild, and White Fang. His novel, The Sea-Wolf, was based on his experiences at sea. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. (Walcutt 1-2) He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases and drug treatments.
�To Build a Fire� has often been called London�s greatest masterpiece. It is based on the struggle of the intelligence of man versus the intuition of animal (Magill Survey 1810). "To Build a Fire" continuously expresses the man's dwindling warmth and bad luck in his journey along the Yukon trail to meet "the boys" at camp. London associates dying with the man's diminishing ability to stay warm in the frigid Alaskan climate. The main characters predicament slowly worsens ...
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story of Buck, his struggle against humanity, and finally his return back to his roots. Buck was a well treated animal, but his instincts were just too strong for him to ignore. Because of this, when he later found out his master was killed by Native Americans, he stormed through the camp, taking many lives, and fled to the wilderness to join a wolf pack (Walcutt 22-23).
Man versus nature was not the only struggle that London expressed in his stories. In �The Minions of Midas�, a young wealthy businessman is blackmailed for twenty million dollars by men who have made his wealth possible. Man versus himself is the struggle in this story, as the millionaire refuses to give in to the men�s ...
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"Jack London�s Apparent Conflic." Essayworld.com. June 24, 2004. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Jack-Londons-Apparent-Conflic/9987.
"Jack London�s Apparent Conflic." Essayworld.com. June 24, 2004. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Jack-Londons-Apparent-Conflic/9987.
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