Call Of The Wild Short Story

514 Words2 Pages

Two of Jack London’s stories, Call of the Wild and To Build a Fire, are similar and different in many regards. Both stories were published at the start of the 20th century and are based off London’s experiences in the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush. These two tales are alike and varied in several ways. To start, these two stories are set in the same place. In Call of the Wild, page 59, “The second day saw them booming up the Yukon well on their way to Pelly.” It explicitly states that the story takes place in the Yukon, a province in Canada. Pelly is a crossing along the Klondike trail in said province. In To Build a Fire, on the first page it says, “...when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank…” Again, it explicitly states the setting, Yukon, like in Call of …show more content…

“Three miles away Buck came upon a fresh trail that sent his hair rippling and bristling.”(Call of the Wild, pg. 163) Other than the fact of its presence, Buck has no reason to be wary of this trail. A similar occurrence happens on the sixth page of To Build a Fire, “Something was the matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger,-it knew not what danger, but somehow its brain rose an apprehension of the man.” Just like Buck with the trail, this dog had no reason to be cautious of the man. The stories’ similarities don’t stop there, but their differences are many as well. One of the mentioned differences is eyes through which the story is told. In The Call of the Wild, the story is told through a dog’s perspective -Buck’s. “But Buck was neither a house dog nor a kennel dog”(Call of the WIld, page 2). However, in To Build a Fire, the story is told through the perspective of an unnamed man. “Day had broken cold and grey when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail.”(To Build a Fire, page1) This lends a very different light to the two stories, in both detail and

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