“Love of Life” by Jack London ~ Prose Fiction This selection is the end of a story about a man who had starved in the wilderness for several days. Hungry and sick, he crawled to a beach, where he was taken aboard a ship filled with scientists.

1 He was lost and alone, sick and injured too badly to walk upright. He crawled on. There came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made camp, when he broke camp. He traveled in the night as much as in the day. He rested wherever he fell and crawled on whenever the dying life in him flickered up and burned less dimly. He did not try. It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that drove him on. He didn’t suffer. His nerves had become blunted and numb, while his mind was filled with weird visions and delicious dreams.

2 There were some members of a scientific expedition on the whaleship Bedford. From the deck they saw a strange object on the shore. It was on the beach, moving towards the water. They couldn’t tell what it was. Being scientists, they took a boat to see. They saw something alive, but it hardly looked like a man. It was blind, unconscious, and crawled on the beach like a giant worm. Most of its effort to crawl was useless but it kept trying. It turned and twisted, moving about 20 feet an hour.

3 Three weeks afterwards the man lay in a bunk on the whaleship and with tears streaming down his wasted cheeks told who he was and what he had undergone. He also babbled words that made no sense: about his mother, of sunny Southern California, and a home among the orange groves and flowers.

4 The days were not many after that when he sat at a table with the scientific men and ship’s officers. He was happy over the sight of so much food, watching anxiously as it went into the mouths of others. With the disappearance of each mouthful, an expression of deep regret came into his eyes. He was quite sane, yet he hated those men at mealtimes because they ate so much food. He was haunted by a fear that it would not last. He inquired of the cook, cabin-boy, the captain concerning the food stores. They reassured him countless times; but he could not believe them and pried cunningly about the food storage chest to see with his own eyes.

5 It was noticed that the man was getting fat. He grew stouter with each day. The scientific men shook their heads and theorized. They limited the man at his meals, but still his girth increased and his body grew fatter under his shirt.

6 The sailors grinned. They knew. And when the scientific men followed the man, they knew, too. They say him bent over after breakfast, and like a mendicant, with outstretched palm, stop a sailor. The sailor grinned and passed him a fragment of sea biscuit. He clutched it avariciously, looking at it as a miser looks at gold, and thrust it inside his shirt. Similar were the donations from other grinning sailors.

7 The scientific men respected the man’s privacy. They left him alone. But they secretly examined his bunk. It was lined with seamen’s crackers; the mattress was stuffed with crackers; every nook and cranny was filled with crackers. Yet he was sane. He was taking precautions against another possible famine‒that was all. He would recover from it, the scientific men said; and he did, ‘ere the Bedford’s anchor rumbled down in San Francisco.

The point of view from which the passage is told can best be described as that of a -

scientist who traveled on the Bedford and met the man in the story.

narrator who is able to see and understand every aspect of the main character.

friend of the man who learned of the man’s plight and helped him recover.

describing his own experiences and how he was affected by them.