KidLit Forum

This book is about natural instincts of the animals. There are beautiful describing of the cab when he met, from the first time, the water and others necessary things which he need for living. I like the story of White Fang and how he grown up and he learn how to fight to survive, but I like also the story from the beginning of the book. This is very surprising for me. There are people fighting for their lives, fighting for survival. There are scene which I could not forget. These scenes are related to relation between human and animals. People are in the wild, living very bad condition of winter and cold, but they also have trouble with wolves which tries to kill them and aslo they tried to attract their dogs and kill them. I still remember how he makes a fire and was so sleepy, because he don’t sleep for days, and to be sure that wolves didn’t attach him, she falls asleep with a lit stick in his arm. Falling asleep he fills the fire and how it was closer and closer to his arm, but he could not wake up because there are fear and cold that make him fill very tired. But in the other moment, he gets up because a wolf was closer to him and he has to banish him.
There are limited situation and the limit between life and death is very closer.

The effort Jack London made in his attempt to interpret the animal’s inner self to us is mind blowing. I guess he had to read a lot about animals’ mind and about the way they perceive and relate to the world. Here is a very nice quote from the moment he tried to reveal to us White Fang’s “philosophy” of life:

“The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.” (Jack London, White Fang)

It tells us a lot about the way in which animals learn/come to know the laws. Nobody teaches them anything, morals are something very abstract, there is no way an animal can understand such a thing, they don’t have the laws written down on a piece of paper and still, they know the laws very well. It seems like they are born with this knowledge or become aware of it immediately. It is something they inherit from their parents or, maybe, we are dealing with just another wonderful mystery of what life actually is.