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Elements Of Naturalism In The Call Of The Wild

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Naturalism, it isn’t really a word that we hear that often in our day to day lives, but what does it mean and how does it correlate to The Call of the Wild? Naturalism, in this regard, refers to the natural properties and causes which everything arises from. And in this context, we will be examining the setting, plot, and narrator’s storytelling within The Call of the Wild, and how these elements impact our understanding of this work and its relation to naturalism. The first item we will be looking at is the setting in The Call of the Wild. The story takes place in several locations, but the primary place that it seems to revolve around is the Yukon Territory, which is east of Alaska. The timeline takes place sometime between the late 1800s and the early 1900s during the Klondike Gold Rush. The location …show more content…

It is clearly intentional that the main character is a dog, and it is a great choice to show the transformation of Buck being a housedog to becoming a pack leader for wolves. Kelchner says that” His goal is not to make animals appear human, but to emphasize the hereditary connection that humans have with animals” (Kelchner, 2). I think that this is a great point, because when Buck ends up having a connection with Thornton, he is almost humanized due to the friendship that they seem to have with each other. On another note, Dirda discusses how London uses lyrical and beautiful passages in The Call of the Wild, which push us “into the realm of the dreamlike and the fantastic” (Dirda, 259). Anytime that something other than Buck is present, we get this almost sense of dread, because we know that nothing nice has seemed to happen to Buck throughout the story. He goes from bad situations to worse in terms of his care until he finally meets Thornton, and it makes us want to keep reading in hopes that he finally has a life where he is treated

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