The Making Of A Hero

When making a survey over contemporary studies on Jack London, I found something lacking. Nearly all the critical attention has been paid to London's fiction writings, leaving out any of his autobiographical narratives, a portion of writings as were welcomed among his contemporary readership and more important to his public image. What has led to the neglect? Were they truly transparent factual copies that admit of no critical glance? With these questions in mind, I commenced a close research.Given the conventional understanding of autobiography, the neglect is inevitable. Autobiography was, and still has been considered by many to be a factual rendition by a person about his own life. Its significance is believed to exist in keeping a history of what the writer did at an exact time in a specific place, a curriculum vitae matter. Accurate correspondence between the narrated life and actual events is the primary, if not the sole yardstick in autobiography evaluation. London's autobiographies are understandably dismissed from discussion owing to their outrageous inaccuracy. Autos criticism, the recently thriving practice, puts into question the objective historicity implied in bios study. It locates personality in the center of autobiography on the grounds that the individual self rather than lifeless exterior events constitutes the essence of autobiography writing. Autobiography unfolds to the world the writer's interpretation of his past life, upon which, it is argued, rests the writer's true self. By stressing the validity of the writer's individual interpretation of his past experiences, autos criticism suggests that autobiography is more a self-representation in nature than a factual record. But locating in the self source of identity and meaning in the autos criticism basically renders an autobiographical text a transparent mirror held up to reflect one's true self, encouraging a superficial and simplified treatment with it. Recent theories have exposed the illusiveness of the notion of a humanist-essentialist self. They argue that man, together with his conception of himself and the world, is shaped into existence by impersonal structures beyond himself,...