away in a truck. He does not understand why he is being trained, or why that training involves such cruelty in an effort to break his will. He knows what is happening to him but not why, and after a while he stops asking because now he has to deal with the reality of it and not with its intent.
Buck is presented in the beginning as a satisfied animal, happy in his place at the Judge's house and accepted by all as a fine animal. He is taken from that home and sent into the unknown, and more and more he comes to rely on inner forces he did not know existed. James Lundquist points out that The Call of the Wild differs from other dog stories in a number of important ways, beginning with the way in which the dogs are depicted, quite differently from the traditional depictions of dogs in fiction:
Buck is not cute, he is not gentle, and he does not do clever tricks; at one point he learns to steal, and by the end of the novel he has turned into a killer. Everything he does, he does as London thought a dog actually would. All of his thinking is presented as dog thoughts. And when he begins to respond to his primordial instincts, he does so as a dog, not as a man (Lundquist 107).
Lundquist is correct that London presents his dog as a dog, but Lundquist refuses to see that London intends what he says about Buck to extend beyond the world of dogs and to apply to the world of men as well. Lundquist says it is absurd to think of Buck as completing "rites of passage" or indulging in "ritualistic" acts, and while this may be so, it is still true that the story has echoes extending beyond the immediate world of Buck.
London did not like the title The Call of the Wild and
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