"...the trouble with him, is that he had no imagination"

I would agree that it demonstrates London's genius, but i would add the caveat that the dog is a tool with which London also demonstrates his obsession with the notion that greed and selfishness are natural traits. His description of the protagonist in The Seawolf, especially his description of the "ferment" of life, with all life feeding on other life, similarly takes the line that we live in a world of "survival of the fittest" (a perversion of Darwinian theory) and the devil take the hindmost.

Hi,Setanta. There is one thing that I would like for you to clarify for me. Doesn't survival of the fittest simply mean that those who survive do so because they fit the closest to the environment in which they find themselves? A good example of this in terms of fauna would be the coyote.

As to the protagonist, I was especially impressed with London's comment about his lack of imagination. Wouldn't this tend to refute your idea that London's philosophy involved only the eternal struggle of man and beast against nature? I have not read Sea Wolf so I cannot comment.

I just wasted about 30 minutes answering your last post, and then the damned feeble-minded isp Lovey uses lost it, crashed altogether. I'll come back later to answer this, Boss, i've got other things i need to do right now.

oops....tell lovey to start shoppin'..no problem. I hope to be here

London's early experience of working class life strongly colored his later writing. He was a believer in social darwinism, and also what has been termed "scientific racism." Hence, his use of the term, "the inevitable white man," to connote the high probability that European culture would overwhelm more primitive societies. The term "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, although it is linked inextricably in the popular imagination with Darwin. It represents a oversimplification which obscures the implications of Darwin's description of the evolutionary process. Spencer made a meager living with his enthusiastic and ill-conceived version of Darwin in England, but make quite a good living with it on the lecture circuit in America. London may or may not have heard Spencer speak, but he certainly swallowed the concept hook, line and sinker. It is specious on the face of it. Survival determines "fitness," all individuals which survive are fit. Darwin's crucial thesis is the ability to pass on the traits which make a specific individual the one best able to exploit their environment--this is breeding opportunity.

London was a socialist who greatly despised his contemporary society (an idealist who tried also to be a brutal realist--he may have been influenced in this by having been the illegitimate child of a California socialite, abandoned to be raised by a former slave and her civil-war veteran husband, Mr. London). His novel The Iron Heel, posits a facist dystopia in America, which is eventually overthrown by a socialist uprising.

In To Build a Fire, as in so many of his works, London contrasts a character intentionally drawn as weak and foolish with another character (in this case, his canine companion) who is capable, and sufficiently self-centered to immediately take whatever steps are necessary to assure personal survival. London was more complex than the simplistic picture painted in this story, but it is a very good exposition of the most common theme of his writing.

Setanta, I'm going to have to study your response. I hate to do that. I've always operated off the top of my head. I can't do that now...but I do promise you this. It will be what I think and not the thoughts of historians.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Sorry. Been having some trouble myself. The question that is forever nagging at my mind is whether or no a writer allows his own experiences to spill over into his writing. Someone once told me that it wasn't important that an author had or has a rotten life, just as long as what he wrote was not garbage. Well, it's for certain that London didn't write garbage. Sooooooooooooooo. I'll have to think some more, I guess.

Happy New Year, my friends.

From Florida

Happy new year, Boss. London was certainly a good writer. What mattered with his early experience was in the terms with which describes his characters experiences--and the terms by which he judged them and society. None of that detracts from the quality of his art; i do feel it makes his social pessimism suspect.