Thoughts & Analysis on Jack London’s White Fang

Caution! These thoughts on the 1906 book White Fang contain spoilers if you haven’t read it.

Two sled dogs are what’s left of a pack that was picked off one by one — including the humans! — by predatory wolves. They become an item and mate, and much of the story is from the point of view of the lone surviving pup. 



Part II of the book is downright lovely. Jack London does a pretty affecting job of capturing the wonder of the young pup learning the world and honing his instincts. It’s absolutely adorable, is what it is, and if you yourself have a young pup, it’s pretty endearing to imagine experiencing their introduction to the world in similar ways that our protagonist is. Wide-eyed with curiosity, the pup navigates the wilderness and learns his instincts.   



Part III is heartbreaking and rage-inducing the same way the first few chapters of Call of the Wild is. White Fang meets man in the form of Native Americans who have set up camp, and experiences how cruel man can be. It’s honestly traumatic and very hard to read, and any dog-lover and animal-lover could be forgiven if they stopped reading and threw the book at the wall in disgust. There is a saying that there are no bad dogs, just bad owners, and this book is a devastating account of how a bad owner can create an ill-tempered dog. Dogs — just like humans and people and children — are products of their environment.

Part IV contains a Jack London eugenics and racism alert! White Fang sees white people for the first time and somehow intuitively thinks they are the superior gods. Fancy that! In fact, his Native American master Grey Beard is a “child-god” compared to white men, and later on one is described as a “white-skinned superior god.” The irony here is that the dog’s intuition was incorrect, and White Fang finds out that the white dude (named Beauty Smith) he was sold to is an even worse human.

If you thought Part III was heartbreaking, Part IV is actually even worse. There are no words to express just how awful the treatment is that White Fang experiences at the hands of Beauty Smith. “Life had become a hell to him,” Jack London wrote, and that feels like an understatement. Any person with empathy for dogs is going to have to get numb and disassociate themselves to even skim through parts of Part IV. Call of the Wild makes a lot of reference to that “club and fang” world where humans and dogs are often at odds, but White Fang (as in the book, not the dog), definitely delves a lot deeper into that concept in all its infuriating-to-read detail, pages and pages of it. It does not help at all that Jack London was a fantastic writer, and his use of language is masterful and affecting.  

Eventually, though, just like Call of the Wild and perhaps too far into the book for our tastes, the eponymous protagonist is rescued by a kindly human who is prepared to beat the ever-loving crap out of their master. And the book becomes somewhat easier to read — if not enjoyable to read — when his new master makes a point to nurture White Fang with kindness and patience as White Fang learns to find pleasure in being touched and petted and rubbed by man.

The book continues to get better and less hard to read in Part V, when White Fang finally learns what it’s like to be loved. Love is not just a feeling, but an action verb, and his new love-master Weedon Scott takes those action steps to treat White Fang with acts of respect and kindness, and it’s successful enough that White Fang learns to be more trusting and vulnerable enough to snuggle. Reading this is enough to get the tears welling in one’s eyes.

This is the reverse of Call of the Wild. Where Buck was taken from domestication and eventually de-domesticated and introduced to the wild, White Fang was taken from the wild and slowly domesticated to the point that he learned not to pounce on the chickens in his love-master’s coop or eat the meat hanging in the windows of butcher shops. Like Call of the Wild, the ending is a lot happier than the beginning, and every bit as painful to reach.

And like Call of the Wild, this is a work of genius. 

Click on the cover image to buy the White Fang ebook!

Cover Image: The still is from the 1925 film version of White Fang and part of the public domain, per Wikimedia Commons.

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