自然主义在《野性的呼唤》中的体现(2)
杰克•伦敦是美国自然主义作家的杰出代表。他吸收了达尔文的进化论,斯宾塞的社会达尔文主义,尼采的超人哲学和主义. 其自然主义在小说《野性的呼唤》中体现的淋漓尽致。通过对克形象的塑造，让读者深刻地体会到达尔文的适者生存的进化思想，体验到那个时代的人类社会。小说的主人公巴克，曾经是一只家狗，生活在温暖而阳光的南方，在19世纪末掀起的淘金热中，被贩卖到了冰冷的北方帮助淘金者拉雪橇。从巴克被转运到去往北方你的火车的那一刻起，它的命运就彻底改变了。北方恶劣的气候环境折磨着他们，随时随地都会有新的挑战。因此，每一只狗都必须时刻保持警惕，时刻做好迎接挑战的准备。
小说中讲述的巴克的故事，不仅仅是一只狗的故事，在更深层次上说，是对当时人类社会的深刻反映。这篇论文通过重点分析自然主义在《野性的呼唤》中的体现，来加深对自然主义和杰克伦敦生活的那个年代的社会的理解和认识。
关键词：自然主义，遗传，环境，人类
1 Introduction
American Naturalism is evolved from realism in the late 19th century and early 20th century when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. Jack London, one of the most outstanding American novelists of the time, is a representative and quintessential figure of American Naturalism. His reputation in American literary field rests on his novels and short stories, which mainly center on the reality of his society, especially the law of survival and the will to power, in which his most popular novels The Call of The Wild and The Sea Wolf are the best embodiment. His other famous works, The People of the Abyss, The Iron Heel, The War of the Classes and Revolution, also express his sincere intellectual and personal involvement in socialist movement, which made him one of the most influential writers, not only in America, but in the whole world.
The themes in Jack London’s naturalist novels are mostly involved with the struggling of an individual against the natural force majeure, which reflect the profound influence of American naturalism upon him. As a literary trend, naturalism played an important role in the world’s literary development, inheriting and developing the characteristics of realism in writing, and laying foundation for modernism. The Call of the Wild is the most representative work of naturalism among Jack London’s works.
Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild first bought Jack London worldwide fame and continued to be his best-known work and guaranteed his future works a ready audience. On the day of its publication, 10,000 copies were sold. Within the first 43 days of its publication, 6 million copies were sold in the United States alone. Furthermore, the book was even more widely read outside America. At the end of the 20th century, it has been translated into some ninety foreign languages (Johnson, 2008:xii).
The short novel, set the primitive and icy Klondike as the writing background, connected with the social background of Klondike gold rush. It depicted a story of Yukon sled dog named Buck, who transformed himself from a decent pet to the beast of the wildness through a series of adversities and the cruel treatment he received from human beings, the challenge of other dogs and the arduous nature, but finally went back to the wilderness. Actually, it is those adversities that awoke the inherent and primordial wilderness of Buck，and transformed him into a cunning and aggressive wolf dog who can tackle any difficulty and emergency with the spirit of “super dog”. Buck’s heredity and the treacherous living environment shaped the rebirth of Buck, thus contributing to his survival from the merciless wilderness. Buck’s transformation in the characteristics is the vivid reflection of the current philosophy of naturalism. from portraying Buck’s gradual changes to revealing the formation and development of the dog’s characters, the novel obviously embodies genetic determinism and environmentalism advocated by naturalism initiator, Zola, and fully expresses Darwin’s theory of “ the big fish eat the small, the fittest survive”.
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