It was a Dog Because It Never Resisted

It was a Dog Because It Never Resisted

A Dark, Brown Dog

     One of the fundamental ideas of naturalism is that the nature is indifferent. It is, in the same time, powerful, and greatly “superior” to humans since humans’ lives are determined by the nature in naturalistic views. Naturalists view humans as just a part of the absolute nature, thus humans are not so much different from animals, insects, and so on. The two stories carry this characteristic well enough.

     In To Build a Fire, when the protagonist stands on the verge of death, he tries to cut the dog open in order to gain its warmth. In A Dark, Brown Dog, the family shows savagery toward a poor, weak dog; the father “held a carnival with the cooking utensils-the furniture and his wife.” He even throws the dog out the window. Here the savagery of humans is revealed-the “civilization” doesn’t work in these stories. Both stories concentrate on how humans are just a segment of the nature by “joking off” civilization. Savagery-one of the instincts the nature had given-was what revealed or portrayed under the cover of civilization.

     However, a question can come up at this moment: so what? It can be plausible, that humans are a mere part of the absolute nature. But like what the doctor in La Peste by Camus said, “People don’t give up.” The pastor in La Peste stressed in his speech about how God had created and planned everything in order, and so that the plague is part of his plan so the people should not deny. But the doctor criticized him, that no matter what people know about who plans their lives, people never give up-even if they think they did, they live their lives with hope at least in some parts. Naturalism can be criticized in the same way also.

Comments

Soyeon Min: It was interesting that you compared the story with an outside text, La Peste. However, to a reader who had not read La Peste, the last paragraph was a little hard to understand. I think your writing could be better if you could include some brief explanations about the plot and context of La Peste so that the reader can better understand. Also, I did not quite get the part you mentioned about “predetermined destiny.” Why is “predetermined destiny” and “god’s will” relevant to naturalism? I think you have a brilliant idea and your essay would be better if you could better elaborate.

But I liked your writing anyways.

Yunjo Jeong: (He commented on several grammatical mistakes and commented right beside the text. Those comments except the grammatical checks are the below ones.)

I see, but don’t they also distinguish between humankind and nature?

So, civilization is losing its function even in “civilized” nations of the world. Is it?

Great here, but can you also explain why the dog did not resist to any violence incurred upon him?

Well I never read this one.

What Naturalists have Missed

What Naturalists have Missed

To Build a Fire

     In naturalistic novels, humans who try to fight against the superior but indifferent nature, fail and surrender. This idea corresponds to Social Darwinism, and the naturalists have also tried to reveal the “brute” in humans, which exists inherently among all of them. Naturalism prevailed around the early 20^th century, when all the economic depressions and the two brutal World Wars had happened. A lot of the authors were naturalists, and Jack London of To build a Fire, and William Golding of the Lord of the Flies were among them also. Throughout the story To build a Fire, London tries to show the ugly side of human instinct-the selfish instinct to survive, the arrogance that eventually led himself to destruction-and, how the nature is superior to the man; no matter how hard the man struggle, he fails to overcome the nature. 

     The arrogance the author tried to show appears from almost all parts at the front of the story. For example: "He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances", "Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head” and "What were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that was all." This arrogance was something that eventually led himself to destruction. The man shows his selfish instinct to survive; he tries to kill the dog just to thaw out his hands. Despite of all his continuous trials of building a fire, nature, much more superior to him, strikes him ruthlessly, and finally leads him to death. 

     The impression I got from this story, however, was that London failed to describe the real general human instinct. Like what the most naturalists tend to do, London picked certain parts from human life and wrote his story using them as a tool to convey his meanings. But the world is definitely something more than he wrote. To explain, London had missed the fact that humans are not all arrogant as the man in this story does. There are a lot of humans that do recognize fifty degrees below zero as something that can freeze them to death. Therefore, the story is about an extraordinary man who is stupid enough to not care about such a freezing weather when the bulk of human beings are not, and thus the story fails to describe the nature of most humans.

          This does not apply to this story but also to most of the naturalism stories; humans are something more than they think. And, in the same vein, I really agree with Eric Sundquist said:  (Naturalism is) “revelling in the extraordinary …… and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature……” One strong reason is that, humans resist, even to the absolute thing like nature, and there are ones who do not surrender when naturalists think all humans would. And because of them humans do not live in a place where is affected only by nature; humans live in the place where they believe they can change it.

Camus, despite the fact that he had also experienced World Wars and economic depression, and even that he was once a soldier in those wars, wrote completely different novels. His fundamental idea is based on “resistance.” Resistance, according to Camus, is what dignifies human. One of his masterpieces, La Peste, is a typical story that shows this “resistance” idea. Plague was all over the city, and people were dying helplessly. Rieux, the protagonist, fights against the disease by incessantly taking care of the patients. He never gives up, and he never even thinks of giving up his "resistance" against the plague even when the plague was at its peak, that it seemed so powerful and endless to win over. The plague symbolizes the irrationality human beings can face; something out of their will, but in the same place, something so powerful. Rieux never surrenders, and his fight continues until the plague finally ends.

Always there has been someone resisting against the unreasonable society. No matter how powerful the absurdity seemed to be, there were people who gave away their lives and rebelled to their realities. That is the part the naturalists have missed: humans resist, and it is not the few minority of the whole human being; the history could go on with those resisting people’s incessant challenges. There has been, and will be, people who try to fight against the unreasonable reality, and what matters is not the effect but the fact that he resisted: that is what finally dignifies humans. Naturalists have missed that part of humans. Humans don’t accept the world as it is; they fight against the reality for a better place for them. They do not surrender, and some of them give up what their most basic instinct try to protect: their lives. They do it for the world to change.

If William Golding has really written his story Lord of the Flies as a response to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, he missed to see how the old man successfully and incessantly resisted against the superior nature, the sea. That spirit of unquailing resistance surely exists among humans, and if the object of resistance is powerful or not does not matter, because there are still people who resist against things that seem impossible to win over, like the old man. Human beings do have people like the old man, and therefore the view that humans would always fail to make changes and surrender to the superior nature cannot be enough to explain the whole human being. The world is somewhere more hopeful than naturalists view it, since it has people that will resist for a better world.

Comments 

Chonghyun Ahn: I was unsure on how you came to the conclusion of this story was about ugly human instincts. If the conclusion is right, it'd be better to see why the author came to such thoughts and then refute by using more examples other than a quotation. I agree that men are depicted negatively, and that there was extreme pessimism, but I'd like some more support behind that.

Yun Jo Jeong: Sorry. I see it has a great level of academic discussions, but I'm not in the position to connect on this. Just two words is enough: Good Job! +) he checked several grammatical mistakes