A Study Of The Marginality Of The Protagonists In Jack London’s Novels

The stronger are the typed characters repeated by Jack London. But this kind of tenacious survivors who are generally showing marginality. Based on the thinking of the relationship between environment and destiny, Jack London tended to highlight the characters’opposite factors relative to strange environment and culture in his novels, and hereby represented their marginal experience under the unfamiliar culture system, that is the marginal situation of exclusion, no sense of belonging and the feelings of loss in their hearts. Jack London had so deeply personal experience of this that he had been devoting himself to exploring the answer to how to eliminate the marginal existence.Jack London did different attempts in his process of exploring. Marginal men in his novels had adapted to the new environment and realized their value after adjusting the internal conflicts, this pursuit of self-fulfillment in life is significantly affected by Superman Philosophy of Nietzsche. Jack London put emphasis on the role of love and collaboration while he emphasised on individual efforts, he tried to find a balance between social Darwinism and Marxism. However, the fragility of human nature in reality and the complexity of urban environment forced to break the writer’s ideal. Self-realization in reality became a dream, hamonious coexistence with others became an extravagant hope, as a result, village and wilderness got to be the paradise that Jack London wanted.Jack London shaped the characteristic of marginal man to concern marginal people in reality, in addition, he tried to achieve the purpose of self-gratification and; self-treatment by literature creation. Searching for transcendentality in the self-realization, getting redeemed in love and revolution, returning to village and primitive society to reshape the civilization, these were all originated from the ideologies of American Dream and Socialism which prevailed in society. Therefore, reflection on the fate of these two currents by Jack London is implied in these rescue methods, the profound impact of various ideas in different periods on the writer also can be seen.Overall, Jack London described the marginality of characters not only in the spatial dimension, but also expanded step by step to the group, class and cultural dimensions, and then he explored the spiritual world of the characters. Spiritual inspiration and moral warning have been given in his novels, from this point of view, Jack London is indeed a profound writer who deeply thought about times and humanity.