The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Jack London here has articulately penned an intense and absorbing life story of a dog, called as buck by his masters. The book offers myriad of emotions, strikes at the heart of reader and generates in him love and affection for the dog. 

It is a tale of this pampered dog, buck, who lived in an area which never saw a single flake of snow before landing up in the arctic where he is forced to toil hard for survival. 

Buck, sees a number of disparate masters in the arctic, unique in a number of ways. All of them in addition to his constantly evolving surroundings, play a pivotal role in shaping his character to a defiant and ferocious animal from a pampered and tamed one. The portrayal of his struggle, not just with the sudden change in his environment, but with the gradual change that happens in himself, the change that questions his morality, his sanity and the change that slowly makes him a wild beast, is the soul of the book and makes the book gripping and riveting till the very end. 

Moreover London here has highlighted the theory propounded by Nietzsche which holds that ‘the instinct for the acquisition of power is the prime factor that motivates all the activities of life’, by showing that it is not merely the will-to-live rather it is the will-to-power that supremely governs our actions and in light of the book it can be seen that is indeed what every animal’s (including man) ‘primal self’ desires.