The boys drink and review Yuengling’s Oktoberfest beer, then discuss Jack London and his amazing character, Wolf Larsen.
London was an incredibly prolific writer, with 23 novels, 3 plays, several works of non-fiction, some poetry and a huge collection of short stories.
In The Sea Wolf, we meet Wolf Larsen, the captain of a sealing schooner. Larsen is a fierce, aggressive, brutish and cruel man, who is also an autodidact, and a convinced materialist who places no value whatsoever on human life.
P&C reflect on Larsen’s worldview, whether it’s a necessary consequences of materialism, and how it touches on existentialism.
I understand that London himself said that Wolf Larsen was meant to represent a Nietzschean Übermensch. In that regard he was way off the mark. Of course as a socialist he was naturally opposed to Nietzsche, who in fact trashed socialism as “slave morality,” born out of pity no less than Christianity was. It is not at all a “survival of the fittest” that he is espousing. It is rather a kind of elitism. In London’s universe, however, there is a lack of nuance, as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer, “materialists” all get thrown into the same unsavory pot of stew.
I have serious doubt whether a novel in which “worldviews” are embodied in characters really give you much in evaluating the perspectives under consideration (cf. Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov.”) Nevertheless, I understand why people get fascinated with reading them, especially when they are the products of talented writers. No harm done if they entertain. But I have serious reservations about whether they can do more than that.