KidLit Forum

Although based on real and experienced facts of life, Buck's incredible surviving story seems cut out from a fairy tale. It is one of the many characters endowed with qualities that have helped him not just to survive but to grow stronger physically, intellectually and emotionally. The primordial instinct of survival had him use at full capacity all his qualities and has made possible the re connection with the ancestral filings, gone to sleep deep inside his DNA structure. The wild in him has come to life when wilderness crossed roads with him...
Buck's evolution from a pet to a patch leader is strikingly resembling to the one of a human hero and can be considered a kind of Bildungsroman - one in which the hero accumulates on the level of surviving skills but looses civility in the process.
He's "sense of moral" is strikingly one of a human being's, so this strong anthropomorphism of Buck's behavior brings a certain touch of fable while his existence in the last part of the novel as a ghost take's it right in the fantasy area.