The tone of White Fang is straightforward, scientific, and highly descriptive. The third-person omniscient narrator—although primarily focusing on White Fang and giving some basic insight into his thoughts and emotions—generally sticks to relaying what can be observed through one’s senses, creating an objective and scientific tone. This gives the novel a similar effect to that of a nature documentary, with the narrator playing an observational role. Also similar to a documentary film, the vivid descriptions of nature in the novel are often precise and detailed to a point that verges on photographic. This reveals Jack London’s own careful observation of the natural world and interest in representing it realistically, as well as his intimate familiarity with the Yukon wilderness, born of his time spent there as a young man during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897.
An example of this scientific, documentary tone can be found in Part 2, Chapter 1, when three male wolves fight to mate with White Fang’s mother, Kiche:
Together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him […] But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as in battle. The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound on his shoulder. The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival. With his one eye the elder saw his opportunity. He darted in low and closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well. His teeth, in passing, burst the great vein of the throat. Then he leaped clear.
This straightforward and objective tone, in which the narrator relays the events of nature as they happen without editorializing them, is characteristic of much of White Fang. It is also typical of the literary Naturalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, and to which Jack London’s fiction is generally considered to belong. Literary Naturalists were inspired by the scientific method, seeking to represent the natural world realistically and objectively without imbuing it with human emotions and motivations as the earlier Romantics did. Although London does occasionally slip into a more Romantic tone than a Naturalistic one—particularly when depicting the cruelty of nature and White Fang’s awestruck attitude toward humans—it was his goal to represent the natural world and White Fang’s wolflike consciousness as naturalistically as possible. Though there was no way for him to know for sure what the inside of a wolf’s mind was like, he attempted to portray it as realistically as he knew how, including such disclaimers as “He did not reason out the question in this man-fashion,” “the cub did not think in man-fashion,” etc., to make it clear that while the narrator may need to use human terms to relay White Fang’s thoughts and feelings to the reader, White Fang does not think as a human does.
Even while the novel keeps an objective distance from nature, it also takes a deeply sympathetic and compassionate tone toward White Fang’s struggles. Throughout the novel, it is clear that White Fang’s viciousness and anger are not his fault, but the result of the cruelties inflicted on him by his human masters. White Fang’s hate toward the world is portrayed as the result of injustice and abuse. When he finds healing in his love for his final master, Weedon Scott, at the end of the novel, the tone is compassionate and joyful, with White Fang being described as finally “flourishing like a flower in good soil,” where before his poor environment caused him to grow cramped and stunted.
