Call of the Wild and the Ethics of Narrative Strategies

Abstract

How can the analysis of narrative structures contribute to the understanding of what makes a text´s "environmentality" (see Buell 2005:25)? By reading Call of the Wild from a narratological perspective and against the historicist foil of its discursive context, this paper seeks to illuminate how strategies of narration lend to an eco-centred reading - even despite the text´s apparent ethical orientation. The discursive circuit thus established enables a textual negotiation of diverging ethical convictions and aspects of compassion and giving voice to an animal. Eventually, reading and interpreting texts can thus be described as an "applied ethics" (Iovino 2010: 41) the features of which this essay seeks to describe as the "ethics of narrative strategies".