ZOONYMIC IMAGERY AND THE NATURALISTIC VISION IN JACK LONDON'S THE SEA WOLF

Abstract

Animal names, epithets, and animal-derived imagery run all through Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904), and this article asks what they're actually doing there. Working through close textual analysis from a naturalist-critical angle, I sort the novel's zoonymic vocabulary into recurring categories and trace the work each one performs — in characterization, in theme, in the book's broader ideological argument. What emerges is that London uses zoonyms as more than decoration: they form a structural device that encodes his central philosophical tension, biological determinism pulling against human moral aspiration, and that tension is nowhere more concentrated than in the figure of Wolf Larsen. I close by situating these findings within London's wider naturalist poetics and pointing toward comparative work with other literary traditions that lean on animal imagery to think through power, survival, and civilization.