Peer Pressure: “The Sea-Wolf” by Jack London, Book Review Example

“The Sea-Wolf” by Jack London is a trilling adventure novel, and is a bright exemplar of the genre indeed. Besides being a wonderful and absorbing sea voyage epic, it is also an intricate novel full of profound ideas and philosophical reflections. Do not only London introduces in the novel one of his most intriguing, complex fully realized characters, the schooner’s captain Wolf Larsen, but also explores profoundly remarkable themes of desire, bravery, and the inborn will to survive. Through amazing transformation of one of its central characters, Humphrey Van Veyden, London illustrates how circumstances form human personality, and how one never knows the hidden resourcefulness of own soul and flesh. One of the fundamental ideas the author promotes in the novel is how being outside the comfort zone can contribute a lot to one’s self-development.

“The Sea-Wolf” is the dramatic story of a gentleman intellectual, Humphrey Van Weyden, who is saved by a seal-hunting schooner named “Ghost” after being involved in an accident caused by collision of two ferryboats in San Francisco Bay. Being rescued by Wolf Larsen, a captain of an ill-fated schooner, he is then forced to become a cabin boy, do menial work, and discover how to fight to defend himself from a brutal crew. Being kept on the ship by force, Van Weyden goes through all kinds of adventures, becomes a member of a crew, participates in seal hunting and falls in love with another schooner “prisoner”, Maud Brewster, till finally escapes the “Ghost” and breaks out of Wolf Larsen’s ruthlessly brutal domination.

At the core of the plot lies the conflict between two drastically different individuals: Humphrey, who is weak of body yet strong of mind, a bookworm as he calls himself, used to living a life of comfort and wealth, a “sissy” with little understanding of how real life looks like; and Wolf Larsen, brutal, cynical and amoral, who crushes anyone standing in his way, displaying tremendous physical strength, spending his entire life at sea, knowing perfectly well how it is to earn one’s own living and to struggle to survive. As the story proceeds, the readers observe how Humphrey turns into a different individual, how he adjust to the circumstances being imposed on him by powerful captain and how his personality is being uncovered in the most surprising way.

The transformation Humphrey experiences consists of two major parts: physical and moral one. Practically the very moment he gets on the schooner, he is forced to change attitude to own physical state. Having trouble with his knee, he experiences pain and learn to fight it on his own, unaided. “Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a trained nurse… I would have been lying on the broad of my back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do nothing but rest… I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression,” he argues (London 28). Restraining own pains and keeping from suffering out loudly seems to be a new experience to him, yet he has nothing to do but to submit to the unspoken rules established on the Ghost.

Humphrey is forced to do a lot of hard manual work for which he is totally unsuited.  The author describes how he is getting more and more physically tough and able to deal with tasks he was completely unaware of before becoming one of Ghost’s crew members. Unused as he is to work, he starts to realize the true value of comfort: “Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been resting all my life and did not know it. But now, could I sit still for one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most pleasurable thing in the world.” (London 42) His muscles are being developed, his previously pale tender skin is getting suntanned and rough, and he is watching own body changing with a great deal of surprise. By paying attention to these details the author is most probably implying that true masculinity is impossible without appropriate physical fitness.

The fact that intellectually developed yet weak gentlemen is getting hardy and resistant illustrates the transformation his emotional state is going through. Dealing with physical labor brings Humphrey to what he himself calls a “revelation”: “I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working people hereafter. I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing.” (London 42) When managing confusing situations and conflicts, he recognizes himself experiencing emotions he has never before realized himself to be able to feel.

His emotional transformation can be divided into a number of stages that are determined by several storyline’s turning-points. First of all, Humphrey surprises the readers by being able to do hard work, of which he seems to be unable at first. Then the author describes how Humphrey’s conflict with Thomas Mugridge, schooner cook, develops. Young man shows himself to be surprisingly courageous and sharp. Humphrey describes himself as becoming animal-like, and illustrates how at the moment of danger he snarled in cook’s face “so terribly that it must have frightened him back.” (London 60) He argues not to like the picture of himself, claiming that it reminds him of a rat in a trap, with his “lips lifted and snarling like a dog’s, my eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of fear and helplessness”. (London 60) However, Humphrey is behaving here as someone being smart and reasonable rather than animal-like. He demonstrates own resourcefulness, by resolving the conflict so that no one is hurt and he is the winner.

Humphrey follows by discovering himself capable of wicked thoughts. Referring to already mentioned conflict with Mugridge, Humphrey confesses how the overall viciousness prevailing among Ghost inhabitants affects his views of surrounding reality. “My reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in it. And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,–for sin it was,–I chuckled with an insane delight,” he declares dispiritingly (London 84). Being self-conscious about own feelings and thoughts, Humphrey strives to prevent himself from emotional and intellectual degradation; he struggles his true beliefs to survive the pernicious influence of surrounding brutality.

Is it weird though that he discovers himself to experience contradicting emotions? Everything happening to Humphrey on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as he struggles to adjust to his new environment, is matters of dishonor, degradation and pain. Inner bewilderment he is experiencing is akin to cultural shock. He is surrounded by things completely strange to him, by people who trample upon everything he has ever believed and disregard the laws of morality by which he is used to being guided his whole life. “Force, nothing but force obtained on this brute-ship. Moral suasion was a thing unknown. Picture it to yourself: a man of ordinary stature, slender of build, and with weak, undeveloped muscles, who has lived a peaceful, placid life, and is unused to violence of any sort–what could such a man possibly do?” (London 32) Rejecting Wolf Larsen’s forbidding philosophy at first he then becomes more and more inclined to regard it as one worth consideration. He hates to admit that his unawareness of the realities of life had been absolute indeed.

However, Humphrey eventually realizes that the number of disappointments he has gone through while residing at schooner is a sort of side effect accompanying the process of maturing into a courageous man and a truly rational, determined individual. He never fails to believe what he used to believe though. He just becomes more emotionally mature. His major principles do not change however; it is rather that they become more conscious. They are now established more strongly since being practically applied they survived all the experienced mishap and troubles. Moreover, young man’s strong devotion to own believes and principles could have been the actual reason of his salvation, – maintaining loyalty to own self, Humphrey is endowed with hidden powers that no one else expected him to have. He wins over Wolf Larsen and over circumstances by representing virtues of which his opponents are simply unaware.

At the end, Wolf Larsen, previously filled with amazing physical and emotional strength, violent and amoral, is dying in pain, haven never accomplished anything truly great, while Mr. Van Weyden, who is now grown-up, virile and emotionally established, who is madly in love with women returning his affection, is happily delivered from all the disasters he has faced, his morals and virtues safe from whatever influence he has ever been subjected to. He made use of the adventure to become stronger and healthier, both physically and emotionally, to form a more objective attitude to life, instead of giving up, betraying own philosophy and becoming self-destructive as Wolf has been enthusiastically inclining him to be.  When facing another danger towards the end of the story, Humphrey exclaims: “And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid. The death which Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longer feared”. “I forget my own life in the love of another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live as right now when I place the least value upon my own life. I never had so much reason for living” (London 185) Humphrey concludes at the end of the novel, reassuring the readers that from now on he will just be all right.

Works Cited

London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf.  New York: Bantam Books, 1963.