Previous
Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Crushing Silence:
In Part 1, Chapter 1, London uses an extended simile to describe the effect of the Northland on Bill and Henry’s psyches, exploring the smallness of human pursuits when compared with the vast power of the natural world:
On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardors and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and interplay of the great blind elements of great blind elements and forces.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Sphinx's Laughter:
In Part 1, Chapter 1, London uses an extended simile to compare the frozen Northland wilderness to a sphinx, thus characterizing it as cruel and enigmatic and painting the relationship between humans and nature as hostile. In the following passage, he depicts nature as laughing cruelly in the face of humanity’s struggle to survive in the harsh arctic landscape:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement; so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was as mirthless as the smile of a Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking in the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.
Related Themes:
Part 2, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—White Fang as a Plant:
In Part 2, Chapter 3, London uses a simile to compare White Fang and his siblings to plants moving toward the light that shines through the entrance of the cave they were born in:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The life of his body and every fiber of his body, the life that was the very substance of his body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward this light and urged his body toward it in the same way the cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun […] The light drew [the pups] as if they were plants; the chemistry of life that composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and mechanically, like the tendrils of a vine.
Related Themes:
Part 5, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—White Fang as a Plant:
In Part 2, Chapter 3, London uses a simile to compare White Fang and his siblings to plants moving toward the light that shines through the entrance of the cave they were born in:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The life of his body and every fiber of his body, the life that was the very substance of his body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward this light and urged his body toward it in the same way the cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun […] The light drew [the pups] as if they were plants; the chemistry of life that composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and mechanically, like the tendrils of a vine.
Related Themes:
