The Motif Of Nature In Jack London's Klondike Stories

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“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time” (“Jack London” Wikiquote). London wrote this, it and it is quite clear that he believed every word. Based on his writings, London believed that people lived and died by the rules of nature. He believed, that the strong lived, and the weak perished. Jack London also had a very interesting life one filled with adventure. He spent most of his life on the run looking for an adventure. London would later write about these adventures. Through his experiences he formed many strong opinions on nature, and who could survive in nature. Jack London used the brutality of nature which he depicted through the environment, beasts, …show more content…
He uses the wild in its’ purest, and most unfiltered form. Whether he does this through the characters, the animals, the environment, or the simple rules of nature. London utilizes the cruelty that is nature. Most all of London’s writing focuses on nature in some regard, or has a very strong motif of nature. This is an important characteristic of London’s writing style, and is quite clear in all of his stories. London has a whole collection of stories which were labeled the Klondike Stories, and these obviously have a strong motif of nature. This motif is made so clear that the collective title of these stories is associated with nature. Furthermore, even a story that is not necessarily meant to have a nature motif, may still seem as if there is one. One such story is, “Told in the Drooling Ward.” This story takes place in a hospital, yet London is still able to weave in the nature motif. London writes, “By and by it got real black, and we were hungry, and we didn’t have no fire. ...and all we could do was shiver. ...and worse than everything it was quiet” (London. “Told” 377). Even when the purpose of the story is not to talk about nature, or the effect it has on people, London still writes nature into the story. London even uses this small anecdote that discusses nature to classify it as brutal, like he does in most of his stories. This shows how London weaves this aspect, of the wild, into nearly all of his stories. He uses the brutality of beasts, i.e. dogs, the sadism of humans, albeit through a foil, the and the law of nature, in order to depict this savageness. In his stories he would use his ideas on nature to talk about, survival of the fittest, an idea that he took stock in after reading Charles Darwin in high

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