Why did you choose this particular book?
I choose this book for the name of author, Jack London. The first time I heard of his name is in a brief comment of a song, I have forgot the content but the colors of black and red, the words of Jack London and suicide. I was initially curious to him but did not want to know more about him.
I don’t know why, but maybe I do. I am too curious to easily get the bottom of truth. That must be a kind of fear, or excitation. Now it come the chance, the chance to step to him, Jack London.
Title
Abstract：
This is a book-report based on The Sea Wolf（Jack London). The report analyzes the main characters of novel to show the personal viewpoint of meaning of life.
The book portrays the image of a superman in Nietzsche---Wolf Larson and treats him as a magnifying glass to speak out a world view accumulated by numberless realities. The novel through the eyes of Humphrey Van Weydent to read this struggling powerful soul and get everyone into a thinking of how we live a life that is doomed to death.
Key word:
（Wolf Larson, Van Weyden, live, meaning, speak out）
Title
1. Brief Introduction of Jack London
Jack London (born Jan.12, 1876, died Nov.22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of White Fang and Call of the Wild, set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay
2. Plot
Humphrey van Weyden, a famous intellectual in New York
Larsen did not believe in the immortality of the soul, he found no meaning in his life save for survival and pleasure and had come to despise all human life and deny its value. dora games Being interested in intellectual disputes with Van Weyden, Larsen somewhat took care of the 'Hump', while forcing him to become a cabin boy, do menial work.
During Hump generally infiltrated to the daily life of sailorman, the Ghost picked up a female poet named Maud Brewster. Miss Brewster and Van Weyden had known each other before. Both Wolf Larsen and Hump immediately felt attraction to her, and Hump took her as his first true love. He tried his best to protect her from the crew, the horrors of the sea, and Wolf Larsen.
As this happened, Wolf Larsen met his brother Death Larsen. Wolf kidnapped several of Death's crew and forced them into servitude to fill his own rank. During one of Wolf Larsen's intense headaches, Hump stolen a boat and fled with Brewster.
The two eventually landed on an uninhabited island, they named it Endeavour Island Endeavour Island
Van Weyden finishes repairing the Ghost, and he and Miss Brewster set sail. During a violent storm, Wolf Larsen passes away. They give Larsen a burial at sea, an act mirroring an incident van Weyden witnessed when he was first rescued. The story ends with them being rescued by an American revenue cutter.
3. Character Analysis
The Sea Wolf is a person, His name is Wolf Larson. The fiction is about marine adventure and without doubt the author had done well in portraying the detail. But the shining point is his brilliant protagonist. Beyond all doubt, Jack London had portrayed his characters in a bright tone Jogos Dora. I could easily differentiate the images of all the characters and sort them out to different groups. But at the same time I noticed that they had the common part with each other; they were independent, but the process of development was interlaced; for this they could not be totally self-existent.
Wolf Larson, the captain of The Ghost, who had a perfectly strong body and brain, was a kind of superman. If the history gave the opportunity to such a man, with the power to rise to any height and unprocessed of conscience or moral instinct, he would stand at the top place, definitely.
But the fact was the opportunity had never come. He was only an obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner. The people around him could not understand him; everyone seemed busy at making a living and never had the interest to philosophize the life; but he did, he opened up the books and spoke to the mind of authors. All kinds of books—navigation, history, literature, biology, even the mathematics, he read them, thought and anatomized, no one had guided him and he had never followed step of anyone or believed in anything, he just picked up the useful information to strengthen his mind, through the interesting information to observe life.
If Larsen just had the perfectly strong body, and the position of captain could totally satisfy him, and he must live a happier life. But he doubted of this world and held the limitless ambition, he opened the book, widen his horizon, touched the reality, struggle with the fate, the act of God. It was impossible to wriggle him free, but he never yielded an inch. He was anguished and walking with the infinite loneliness. He had realized the root of suffering, he had the all power and potential but he born on the wrong side of the tracks, and the external conditions would never change for him and there was no opportunity waiting for him, and the worst of all, he know everything clearly.
During the long solitude, he searched for the meaning of life. He liked to read people around and sized them up. He took them as the samples, and through their manners of speeches and behaviors he tried to figure out the shapes of their souls. He was used to thinking much and talking little, the greater part was due to his totally different outlook. He thought life was a mess, and he used the word “yeast” to describe life, a kind of enzyme that had to keep moving. He said that no one could jump out of the circle, maybe chose to give up moving, give up living was a good way, but the question was, people wanted to live and move. He felt he was the fool of fate but he had to get everything continue. He abhorred the word “have to”. He was so powerful but ever very powerless.
When he met Hump, he had finally got the chance to come to a pause in the endless thinking. They talked about the literature and the philosophy of life and each time it went on as a debate. His thought was clear and he could always express what he thought quite well, just like he had debated with himself too many times. He was waiting enough long for a person to talk with.
He took his stand as a materialist; his viewpoints were unvarnished and persuasive; all kinds of flukes and illusions would submerged by the fact he had held in hand. He was always the winner of debating: his tone was firm; his eyes were sparkling: and his mind was bleak. Maybe what he was looking forward to is getting an opponent to defeat him completely, because he lacked enough power to defeat himself. But in the other hand, he would try his best to fight with the opponent. But the tragedy was that he was too powerful.
Larsen was born to be free, as a minion of God, but it seemed that God had forgotten such a thing; he was fettered from beginning to end. He liked to show people the destruction of valuable things because he could knew clearly about human nature and did not believe the notion of ideal, the so-called truth, virtue and beauty, all of bright things. The only thing he could see was the law of the jungle. This was an evil among all things that were done under the sun; the thing itself just was a tragedy; only death could save, but once died neither had they any more a portion for ever in anything that was done under the sun. His soul was struggling and suffering. He murdered Leach and Johnson not all for their betrayal, there may be another reason that tested the strength of their soul---as the low-down yeast like them, whether they could hold something worth hanging on, which belonged to heart and shamed to speak out. He wanted to know.
"I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions? …my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions give greater delight…I often doubt the worthwhile ness of reason…Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate…It's from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing too, were drunk…Too late. "
The sea is so wide that too easy to make people lost in despair.
2. Humphrey Van Weydent
Van Weyden was a free-lancer of some note. His life was uneventful and comfortable: overshadowed by family, no need to worry about other things beside his own field. But he met the shipwreck as the turn of the wheel. He fell into another world; the world belonged to an opposite class; the world he never paid attention to or pretended to ignore. But now he had to survive among them. The situation was totally hard: his was hurt but no one cared about it; he had to work as a servant and no one gave him a hand; he was trampled by the villain he despised and the others just laughed and laughed. There was no law or moral code to lean upon, so he had to depend on oneself. He gave the role candy-boy, completely, picked all of so-called self-respect, self-pride, hided his timidity, made himself seem as strong as possible.
His life was a flying kite. It had been connived to fly so high that only a light wind could made it lose control, moreover the threat of scissors held in enemy’s hand. It’s the time to wind the line and hold it in the hand. That is the true safety.
He had numerous times debated for the meaning of life with Larsen. He always felt that there must be some wrong somewhere but just could not find the evidence. He found he was even unable to retort any word of Larsen. He was overwhelmed by Larsen’s power, talent and mind. The primitive admiration was attended with the primitive fear, all along.
“He had opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known practically nothing and from which I had always shrunk. I had learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases of existence.”
He gradually adapted to the new environment, and became more and more brave. He conquered Mugridge, tried to protect Leach and Johnson, saved his volition from Larsen’s materialism of desperation. He completed his personality and his soul little by little. Then he was caught in the moment meeting his love. Something he had treaded as a word in the poem and now came true. He got his courage from his goddess to make a change.
They left the ghost and started a new adventure at Endeavour Island Endeavour Island
At the turning of fate, Hump was back to Van Weyden, not that candy-boy, but a bran-new Van Weyden. Goodbye, all of you.
4. Comment:
The Sea Wolf, without doubt, is a novel at one go. It has the well-knit plot, the clear and consecutive narrative of details, and the well-made dialogue. When I shut the book, all of words, impressions and memories become blurred, only leaves the howl of sea breeze and the deathly silence. All that is finished and followed by a fresh start, but I feel strangely subdued this moment. The ending of the novel bears a soul-stirring charm.
The main structural thread of the novel is clear and simple, but the mind is complex. List the novels I have ever read, most of them give me a common feeling—the author tends to fix an ambiguous emotion that hard to express in speech into such a story and make readers catch some feelings more or less when they finish it. Each time I finish my reading I indeed get some feelings but I cannot speak them out. They are stuck in my throat, and I am so shame for my poverty in word. But The Sea Wolf is amazing: London London
I like the way they talk, directly and veritably. Larson was always aculeate. He gave the sharp definition or prediction to somebody or something that convictive. He said that Hump’s conscience was compromise, so he lived ignominiously, untrue to the best he dream of, sinning against his whole pitiful little code. He said that one man could not wrong another man; he can only wrong himself. He said the only value life had been what life put upon itself. He said…Van Weyden always swallowed his voice before Larson’s words. And for me, I don’t want to say anything to oppugn.
I just be guided to accept the truth, but I will never be Larson, neither Van Weyden, or anyone else, for the conformation of every individual is very complex and totally different. I learn to face the world that seems not kind at all. I learn to try my best to live. I know clearly the moment of happiness followed by disappointment is quite brief, but I do not want to give up it just for the result I foresee. In my opinion, the meaning of life is attempt, and never weighs the process by result. Knowledge is one thing, and action is anther thing. I will not blind my heart, live for living; I will be honest to myself and try the life I want to try, I do not want to feel regret for my life at the end of it.
The result is the same---death. At that special moment we could know the death means we have no chance to listen, hear, smell, taste, smile, cry…The most important thing of life never is the fortune and gain, but the seed God has given you. How you nurture it when you have known its fruit will be the death is the way you chose to live.
Conclusion:
What is the meaning of life, the value of life, the essence of life, the immortality, the death? Breathing in which way could live a life without recreance and getting lost? I have read a book named The Golden Notebook, it is a book always asking why, why, why, and we have no answer to anything. But here The Sea Wolf, it seems to speak too much and we lost in believing.
The God let Larsen know too much and Larsen gets his headache and bound his spirit in his flesh. Whether he is regret or not, happy or not, his last line is down. At the beginning, his perfect physique comes to be a reason that disparages others; in the end, his perfect physique atrophies to an ill flesh that no longer is the carrier of his soul. The soul itself knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark.
I do not want to use “result” to name his death, nether ‘immortality”. Just let it go, and hand over the confusion to such a boundless ocean. Where is the end? We search for it here and there till the end finds us and our lives just blossom in period between.
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