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Misinterpreting the Unreadable: Jack London's "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth".

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From: Studies in Short Fiction
Date: 19970922
Author:Riedl, Gary; Tietze, Thomas R.

In his tales of the South Seas, Jack London so often employs dark humor and grim irony in order to illuminate the ruthless exploitation of nonwhite people by white capitalist interlopers that, at first reading, "The Chinago" and "The Whale Tooth" seem to offer little that is different. In one a person of color, a Chinese "coolie," is caught in the harrow of European efforts to colonize and exploit the resources of a remote island. In the other a white man becomes the victim of his own impulse to proselytize the benighted "heathen" on Melanesia. Both stories depict victims of the ...

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