Free and Determined: Questions of Agency in The Road and The Star Rover

This chapter discusses the ways in which London frequently represents the interplay of freedom and determinism in his work. The analysis focuses primarily on The Road, his tramp memoir, and The Star Rover, his prison novel and discusses how these novels address issues of agency. Most often, London posits that a viable category of agency exists and that a degree of moral responsibility is defensible; however, the degree of freedom and level of accountability he most consistently portrays are notably limited. Though his views on agency were not static, London most frequently dramatizes a position in the free will-determinism debate that resembles a compatibilistic view of free will. For London, the complexly muddled and inevitable intermingling of (often unconscious) deterministic factors with unimpeded conscious choices diminishes the cogency of the compatibilist position; yet, at the same time, he is unwilling to completely dismiss compatibilism because it presents a means to understand—and possibly to most fully realize—the widest range of whatever freedoms may be available. These tensions are central to the themes and conflicts in The Road and The Star Rover, where London explores the coexistence of free will and determinism.

Into and Out of the Wild: The Call of the Wild and White Fang

This chapter explores London’s two famous dog novels. The Call of the Wild and White Fang are analysed in relation to the themes of initiation, adaptation, captivity, and freedom. Particular emphasis is given to the conflict between the formation of social dominance hierarchies and the urge toward solidarity and cooperation—a key conflict that runs throughout London’s work. The two novels are also considered in relation to a phenomenon the fascinated London: The ability of an organism to override biologically inscribed behavioural scripts and adapt to changing environments. The chapter also examines the significant Naturalistic features London stresses and describe how each text depicts crucial distinctions among amorality, immorality, and morality. In addition to these harsher Darwinian themes, this section examines London’s depiction of altruism.

Class Struggle: Socialist Writings and The Iron Heel

This chapter examines key features of the author’s political and socialist thought. It offers thematically related analyses of the novel Before Adam and three politically weighted stories—“The Strength of the Strong,” “Goliah,” “The Apostate”—that confront economic exploitation and inequity. This chapter also presents a reading of London’s most overtly political novel, The Iron Heel in which London develops a more idealized Nietzschean superman figure in his protagonist Ernest Everhard. Lucid as Everhard’s arguments may appear, his revolutionary socialist agenda encounters substantial resistance, and these challenges register some of London’s more pessimistic reservations regarding the agenda of the Socialist movement at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Coda: Literary Legacy and Scholarship

This concluding chapter offers a succinct overview of London’s position in the canon of American literary studies and highlights important biographical and critical studies of the author’s work. Over the last three decades, serious scholarship on Jack London has continued to expand and deepen. International readers also incline to see him as an archetypal American writer. Following London’s death, however, literary modernists in the 1920s, whose formal difficulty catered to a culturally elite audience, were wary of his popular accessibility and largely ignored his writing. But his major concerns—generating consolatory value in an increasingly post-theistic world, remedying exploitive socioeconomic systems, and achieving a more nuanced understanding of our psychobiology—remain central to societal, political, and intellectual debates worldwide. The cultural-theoretical turn that shaped most scholarly discourse by the early 1980s initiated a more comprehensive re-evaluation of his writing. By the 1990s a London revival in the academy was well underway and scholars continue to generate innovative critical approaches to his work.

Getting the Perspective: The Northland Stories

This chapter centers on the short stories inspired by London’s Klondike Gold Rush experiences, which provided the settings that galvanized the thematic focus of his writing. The major Northland stories are discussed in relation the motifs of literary Naturalism, with a concentrated emphasis on Darwinian themes and London’s depiction of the primal influence of the natural environment. These stories are discussed in relation the complicated issues of imperialism, primitivism, and racialism that recur throughout these texts. The stories ‘To Build a Fire,” “The White Silence,” “The Law of Life,” “In a Far Country,” “Love of Life,” “The League of Old Men” are analyzed in depth.

Sailing West: The Pacific Stories

This chapter examines how London’s Pacific stories are most frequently concerned with three interrelated subjects: an anthropologically-oriented interest in indigenous cultures and racial groups; an assessment of imperialism’s detrimental effects on native populations and its Western practitioners; and a search for wholeness and meaning through local mythologies, folklore, and religions—modes of inquiry London hoped might moderate the alienation wrought by the capitalistic marketplace and scientific rationalism. The discussion focuses on how, at times, London replicates the racist norms of the dominant culture, while in other instances he protests against them. “The House of Pride,” “The Heathen,” “Good-By, Jack,” “Koolau the Leper,” “Mauki,” “The Red One,” and “The Water Baby” are closely analysed.

Individualism and its Discontents: The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden

This chapter offers a reading of London’s major sea novel, The Sea-Wolf, and his most celebrated semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden. The discussion of The Sea-Wolf focuses on the opposition of Wolf Larsen’s Nietzschean individualism and Humphrey Van Weyden’s collective idealism. This analysis focuses on the ways in which London uses Larsen’s anti-egalitarian materialism and Van Weyden’s more egalitarian idealism to orchestrate an effective and sensational war of ideas. Martin Eden also offers a critique of individualism, but his eponymous writer-hero emerges as a more ambiguous and sympathetic character. Unlike Larsen, Eden is generous and charitable in his social interactions, but his Nietzschean creed manifests itself as severe intellectual malady, which leads to depression, loneliness, and his eventual suicide. London depicts how aesthetic standardization and the popular press also contribute to Eden’s despair.

Jack London: An Adventurous Mind

This chapter provides an overview of Jack London’s life and career and introduces the philosophical influences and literary contexts that shaped and influenced his work. The chapter discusses how London endeavoured to create compelling fiction that was both entertaining and serious, and the methods he used to layer his fiction, crafting gripping surface dramas that overlaid more cerebral motifs to engaged philosophical and socio-political issues. The thematic diversity of his work and his fusional vision are also analysed. The influences of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are considered in association with London’s major thematic concerns and the development of his “motif under the motif” narrative aesthetic. The chapter also discusses London’s engagement with the problem of meaning and value in a post-Darwinian cultural context. The story “South of the Slot” is closely analysed in relation to London’s primary themes and narrative strategies.