Wilderness symbols in Jack London’s The Call Of The Wild

Symbol is a sign that represents others while literary symbol is a word, a phrase that signifies an object or something that reference beyond itself. Novel is a literary work that every reader might gain different perspective towards the conclusion, value, and also ‘symbols’ from the novel they have read. In this case, The Call of the Wild by Jack London is a novel that attract the researcher to dig ‘wilderness symbols’ in it due to the experience of the main character, Buck, as a dog. Therefore, this research aims to find out: (1) wilderness symbols in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and (2) explanation of the relation of those symbols to ‘wilderness’ in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. For this research, descriptive qualitative method is used by analyzing the novel as its document and the theory used to analyze it is Charles Sanders Pierce’s Semiotics about Triadic Relation of Sign as the main theory and other related theories to support. The findings of the data analysis show that wilderness symbols are found along the changes of the main character from the beginning to the end of the story in the novel. Based on its findings, it can be concluded that wildernesssymbols in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild that the researcher found are (1) red sweater, (2) red-eyed devil, (3) the club, (4) the whip, and (5) Yeehats. The symbols are related to wilderness in this novel because those five are the most influence ‘matters’ that give the strong effect to the main character in this novel which his mind, his behavior, and his soul totally changed from the beginning to the end of the story in the novel