Previously in this series: Alexandre Dumas.
You are a dog who has murdered just everyone.
You are a man. You are a man.
You are a woman, and no good to anybody.
You were weak once, long ago, in a land where the sun shone. Now everyone you know is dead.
A man once taught you how to love by beating you gently with his calloused hands. Now he is dead.
You are a man. You have soft hands, and you went to college, and you are useless.
You are cold, and you are going to die. You find this faintly interesting.
You are blind in one eye. Just to be safe, you have killed everyone.
Your enemy is dead in the dust at your feet. Now you are finally free to respect him.
You are engaged in a prolonged philosophical debate with something that is in the process of killing you.
Yours is a still and terrible fury that cannot possibly be tamed.
You are only a boy, but you know your own worth, and you have curled your hand into a fist that will someday punch the world.
You are French-Canadian, and impossibly cruel. Someday one of your mistreated dogs will tear out your throat.
You are in the Santa Clara Valley, and surrounded by flowers and children. This haunts you.
You are dying in the snow. This suits you.
You are in a jute mill, and you have stolen another man’s woman. She makes good pancakes.
You are at sea, and you are going to die. You find this insulting.
You are in a constant struggle for dominance.
You are no–
YOU ARE IN A CONSTANT STRUGGLE FOR DOMINANCE.
You have developed a tortured, nihilistic philosophy all your own over the course of your years at sea. It is terrible.
An old-timer has given you advice; you did not take it. You will drown in your own folly, and also in an ice river.
Tags: books, how to tell what novel you’re in, jack london
Related Posts
You cannot even manage to gut a dog to use its guts for mittens.
the old men told you dogs were full of hot raw mitten guts but you are a fool and don’t heed their wisdom until you are too weakened to properly hold the mitten guttin’ knife
I will spend the rest of my day repeating “mitten-guttin’ knife” silently to myself.
knife goes in, mittens come out
and your hands are SO COLD
Somehow this intersection of Hemingway and Rand is more charming than you’d expect. There’s something romantic about never not having an axe in hand.
I was just going to say at least half of these could also be hints that you are in a Hemingway novel! I forced myself to read A Moveable Feast last week because if there’s one thing I love, it’s crazy anecdotes about the Lost Generation. But I can’t stand his writing style and also his insufferable trick of always saying “My wife” instead of using her name so you can’t tell that all of a sudden he’s talking about wife #3 when two pages ago it was still wife #1.
Wives are totally interchangeable. Why would you care WHICH wife, as long as she fills the position of Wife?
You watch any two animals fight to the death and consider it an excellent metaphor for life, then take it as your personal moral touchstone for the rest of ever.
These are helpful clues that you are in pretty much any naturalist novel (except some of Crane).
You are a dog, and you feel no loyalty towards the dying man by your side, but instead towards those better able to provide you with food and warmth.
Oh, Mallory, I love yours the bestest! <3
You are pretty racist despite your progressive seeming politics!
Oh wait, that was “how to tell if you are Jack London”.
Has anyone else read The Blue Fox by Sjon? Discussing philosophy with the animal you’re trying to kill while trapped in the middle of a snowbank – Jack London would have died of envy.
Based on the comments thus far, I see we’re all still bitter about the “Building a Fire” story.
/s/bitter/loved it to the close of time
You are a dog. Who’s a good dog? Any dog that has not been ruined by man’s civilizing softness. (This is you. You are a good dog.)
Soft handed, college-educated men, come to me, and I will make you excellent pancakes.
Are you open to making pancakes for college-educated, soft-handed women? Heck, I even have an advanced degree, and I will eat vast quantities of your pancakes. =D
All women. All dogs. No one is left behind, except men who prefer dying in the snow anyway.
Calculated to appeal to David Mitford!
Crazy Literary History: Around 1910, London was pretty nigh sick to death of wolves, and the sea, and Alaska, and iron men, and iron wolves on the Alaskan sea. All he wanted to do was add acreage and architecture to his splendid Sonoma ranch.
But the ranch never paid back a fraction of the money he sank into it, so he needed to keep turning out stories to stay solvent–even though, as I said, he was all but out of ideas. So London did what you or I would do in that situation: he hired Sinclair Lewis.
London wrote short stories for a living. Unfortunately, he had trouble thinking up plots. Although Lewis was not yet making a living from short stories, he had thought up a great many plots. So, in 1910, Lewis sold Jack London fourteen short story plots for $70. Two became published short stories; the third the start of a not-to-be-finished novel. Lewis later described London at that time as someone more interested in playing bridge than sea-wolfing.
The “not-to-be finished novel” was The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., which I recommend as an insane combination of muddled philosophical inquiry and mad science murders.
I have never been so happy to not be living in someone’s book.
You really don’t know you’re not. We just haven’t seen the author whose work you are in.
I just mean I am glad I do not see myself in any of Jack London’s stories.
Can my author be Emma Thompson?
You read this and you want them to be true about you, but none of them apply except that you and your useless soft hands went to college.
IT’S WEDNESDAY AND I WANT TO FIGHT A WOLF, DAMMIT
Yours is a still and terrible fury that cannot possibly be tamed.
–oh shit I think i’m in a book–
I have a deep and unabashed love of Wild Fang (and Call of the Wild to a lesser degree) and now I can just flip to this article when I want to read quick summaries of them instead of the books themselves. That way I can take less time away from practicing making my pancakes and punching meat to toughen up my hands.
I am not sure why I never connected Liam Neeson’s “the Grey” with Jack London before.
I loved The Grey and now I am starting to understand why.
The trailer was probably the most misleading trailer of all time, but damn if I wasn’t moved by the ending.
It was filmed where I live so I have to love it, despite its ridiculousness.
You are a man. You have soft hands, and you went to college, and you are useless.
Well, now I have a response to the pushy guys who hit on me when I go to the city.
Your work is constantly quoted by a woman named Leslie Knope in her speeches & memos.
“You are a man. You have soft hands, and you went to college, and you are useless.”
That’s fair. Cruel, but fair.
Ah, The Assassination Bureau–never read the book, but it was also a movie (1969; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064045/?ref_=nv_sr_1… starring Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg that probably doesn’t live up to my dizzy adolescent memories. (One of my best friends had a major crush on Oliver Reed and so we all watched this movie more often than we probably should have. Though since this was pre-video, pre-cable, I’m not sure exactly how we managed to do so … one of the local late night movies must have had it in serious rotation.)
It actually holds up fairly well – I mean, it is what it is, as a 1969 movie, but it’s not one of those things you go back to and find yourself utterly horrified by all the stuff that flew over your head when young.
It appears to be available for streaming from Amazon, so I guess I know what I’m watching this weekend!
This is also how to tell if you are in Ron Swanson’s life.
Ron Swanson would have built a fire.
“You are only a boy, but you know your own worth, and you have curled your hand into a fist that will someday punch the world.”
Replace “boy” with “girl” and “the world” with “your dad,” and this is pretty much how I grew up.
You are hella addicted to alcohol, and also you can iron like crazy because of your years slogging it in a laundry. This disappoints your landlady, for whom you were ironing, because she had the romantic notion that you were a writer. You used to have that notion, but you have drowned it in alcohol.
But then you triumphantly become a writer, and buy your beloved landlady a house! And then drown yourself because success is empty and meaningless.
Your dog has given its life for your victory, and you are too blinded by snow to be traumatized by this.
“Your enemy is dead in the dust at your feet. Now you are finally free to respect him.”
I never realized how much Jack London had in common with Ancient Romans before. This pleases me.
You are waiting for a bus in -40 weather, and… Oh wait, that just when I compare myself to a Jack London novel, hoping I’ll feel warmer that way.
It actually holds up fairly well – I mean, it is what it is, as a 1969 movie, but it's not one of those things you go back to and find yourself utterly horrified by all the stuff that flew over your head when young.
http://youtu.be/grC8VO6xO-w
You have developed a tortured, nihilistic philosophy all your own over the course of your years at sea. It is terrible.
The more I study London, despite his brilliance, I come away not satisfied, and disturbed with his character, but after reading a few lines I am drawn in and all is forgiven.