摘  要

在众多的文学作品里，以动物形象作为主角的作品有很多。动物小说丰富了文学体裁也以另一个视角审视社会。梅尔维尔的《白鲸》和杰克•伦敦的《野性的呼唤》就是两部动物小说巨作。《白鲸》揭示了如果人类只以自我为中心、蔑视自然以及自然中的生命，最终必然会受到自然的惩罚。《野性的呼唤》以一只狗的经历表现文明世界的狗在主人的逼迫下回到野蛮，写的是狗，也反映人的世界。本文重点探讨两部小说的动物形象塑造、主题与艺术修辞手法，通过比较描写两部动物形象的小说，可以看出动物形象的特点是如何展现主题，从而表现出小说独特的新颖之处和精彩之处。同时分析之后还可以发现两部不同的动物形象也正好反映了当时动物文学形象的功能变化。

关键词：动物形象；《白鲸》；《野性的呼唤》
 
Abstract

In many literary works, there are many works with animal images as protagonist. This is not only for the subject matter of literature to develop a new field to dig a new society, but also a whole new perspective. Melville’s Moby Dick and Jack London’s the Call of the Wild are two animal fiction masterpieces. Through meticulous description, Moby Dick reveals if humanity is only of self centered contempt for the nature, humans would ultimately be punished by nature. And The Call of the Wild tells a dog experience from civilized world dog to wild one under the owner’s force. It writes about a dog, but also reflects people of the world. This fiction shows that animals created by Jack London are all of animal images with ideological connotations and artistic styles that are different from traditional animal novels, which has established London as an important writer. This article focuses on how the animal images are shaped in the two novels, as well as their themes and artistic rhetorical devices. Compared with the animal images in the two novels, it reveals how the characteristics of animal images are shown and how animal images express the theme. It also shows the fantasy and novelty of this kind of novels. Meanwhile, by the method of contrastive analysis, it can be found that two different animal images in the two novels also reflect the functional changes of literary animal images in the different times.

Key words: animal image; Moby Dick; The Call of the Wild

1    Introduction
1.1    Social background and literary background
From the middle 19th century to the early 20th century, it is an era of developing and transforming greatly in American history. During this time, America was in a boom of Western Movement. The discovery of Gold in California brought about the Gold Rush. Thousand of Americans headed to the new territory of the west to find a fortune. It pushed the population growth rapidly in the west. With the development of science and technology, American industry was prosperous. Whaling industry made a great contribution to the social wealth.