Throughout the work, “White Fang” by Jack London, we find creatures coming against the edges of their world. They either succeed in surmounting the barriers in front of them, or they fail to enlarge their world and perish. Using the tools and ideas of Jacob von Uexkell, we will look at the gray-cub who becomes White Fang and see the necessary reworking of his reality as he grows and adapts. Like Uexkell’s tick, the gray cub is born blind, and only through “the necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience” (London, 144), is he able to leave behind the shadowy world of his birth. Using the bio-semiotic processes available to him and instincts bequeathed to him by millennia of wolves and dogs alike, the wolf-dog from the Northland Wild expands his perception world to the point that he is at home in the complex man-civilization of California.
By Uexkell’s account, it is not only a very different experience of their environment that each of our world’s many living organisms lives through, but nearly separate worlds, or Welten. Subjectively, the world of a “lower order” creature or organism is a wildly differing world than that identified by a wolf, or a man. This is no strange thing, as each creatures world-view is based on exactly that; what they can perceive and ken in this world. Humans are no …show more content…
A new tone began to show itself to him and edge its way into his Umwelt. He began to love his new god as his “nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun” (London 217). He began to understand Scott’s family and friends, in his wolfish way, as things belonging to Scott, and therefore things to be respected and protected. Weedon’s persistence was paid in full when the day came that White Fang abandoned all fear of his love-master, and all instinctual warnings about the gods, and “learned to snuggle” and was “guilty of it often” (London
By Uexkell’s account, it is not only a very different experience of their environment that each of our world’s many living organisms lives through, but nearly separate worlds, or Welten. Subjectively, the world of a “lower order” creature or organism is a wildly differing world than that identified by a wolf, or a man. This is no strange thing, as each creatures world-view is based on exactly that; what they can perceive and ken in this world. Humans are no …show more content…
A new tone began to show itself to him and edge its way into his Umwelt. He began to love his new god as his “nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun” (London 217). He began to understand Scott’s family and friends, in his wolfish way, as things belonging to Scott, and therefore things to be respected and protected. Weedon’s persistence was paid in full when the day came that White Fang abandoned all fear of his love-master, and all instinctual warnings about the gods, and “learned to snuggle” and was “guilty of it often” (London