White Fang: Book or Movie?

The world we live in is overflowing with technology. Even in a town as small as West Point, Mississippi, where I live, kids take tests on the books they've read on a computer, and they are required to read only books on that computer list. But how many kids today really read those books that they are assigned? Not many, I'm afraid. I have heard far too many kids my own age all the way down to fifth and sixth graders say that they'd rather just see the movie. "It's faster, and I don't have time to read the book. I can at least pass the test if I see the movie." Heard that one before? I thought so. Well, I hope none of those kids were talking about White Fang, the novel by Jack London. If so, I'm sure they were sorely disappointed with their grades.

Just the physical plot differences in White Fang the movie and White Fang the book are enough to make two totally different stories. The movie's main focus is really on Matt, a boy who finds and rescues White Fang and teaches him that not all men are bad. The film events are out of order and the movie stops before the actual ending of the book. The book focuses on the wolf himself—how he thinks, grows, and learns how to determine which "gods," as he thinks of men, are good and which are evil.

But, as different as they are, both the book and the movie revolve around the same central theme. A big difference, and the most important, is how much more clearly the moral message comes through because of the point of view from which London writes. He uses a third person omniscient narrator so that we can see how the animals think. We learn values at the same time as White Fang, and the impact they have is stronger than the movie's attempt to send the same message. In the movie, you see the action but you don't feel it; you don't experience it through the eyes of the animal. Thus, London's point of view is uncanny as well as unique in its ability to portray these morals in a fascinating yet sincere way.

The book begins with two men who are taking a third man who was not strong enough to fight the harsh grip of the Arctic winter back to a trading post in a coffin to be shipped back to England for burial. But before they reach their destination, they are trailed and tortured, night after night, by a pack of hungry wolves who have come upon the first sign of life in weeks, which is not unusual for the famine season of a deep winter above the Arctic Circle.

After a she-wolf that is part dog invades their camp by night and lures their dogs away, all but two of the eight dogs and one of the men are killed as the last man hides the coffin in a tree and heads out alone for the trading post. Strangely enough, White Fang was not a member of this savage pack of starved wolves. Contrary to the film, White Fang does not even appear until almost midway through the book, where he is born in a cave after the famine as a cub of the she-wolf mentioned before. However, he is the only cub in a litter of five to escape the red tint of his mother's coat that betrays her heritage of a life alongside man and his campfire. This could be seen as a successful attempt to foreshadow the cub's future—how for his entire life he will somehow be set apart from others of his kind—both wolf and dog.

Early in the novel, London's writing style asserts itself as unique in its ability to reveal the thought patterns of animals that are based on logic with no analysis of "why," only the importance of "what" and "how," "when" and "where." "Why" is unimportant. Throughout the book, London...