Introduction to English Literature 1
“War”
“War” was written by the American author, journalist, and social activist John Griffith “Jack” London (born John Griffith Chaney). He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.
The main theme of this story is inhumanity and irony of war. Innocent people are losing their lives and their families are in ruins just because the government crave for new properties or natural resources. The title of the story has a great significance. Not only does it introduce the reader to the fact that the story is about war, but it also suggests that the story does not merely represent the unique situation of one specific war. The narrator does not offer the reader any information about this war or who are the participants. This story has no specific place or time because it relates to any war that happened and the ironies of it, in a universal and timeless way. It is about any war, anywhere, anytime and about sadness and pity of them.
The whole story is told from the third person limited viewpoint. The narrator is telling the story about the main character only. The reader does not know protagonist’s thought and emotions. In this story we learn a little about protagonist save that he has “quick black eyes”, is either twenty-four or twenty-five years old and rides his horse “with the careless grace of his youth had he not been so catlike and tense”. The scout is tensely strung, sweaty, wary and litter with leaves and dust with yellow pollen to be unobservable.
In “War” London uses a chronological type of plot, which has a clear timeline and tells the story from the beginning. The plot is linear, progressing through the events to a climax. In the first several paragraphs narrator describes natural setting in details. This description shows to the reader the difference between nature and...