Martin Eden

Description

The Writer’s Struggle Against The Mainstream In Martin Eden

Martin Eden is one of those special novels by Jack London which deals with the struggle of the artist against the mainstream and the mediocre. The novel was serialized between 1908 and 1909 in the magazine Pacific Monthly only to be published in full by Macmillan in 1909.

The novel is centered around Martin Eden – a young artist and proletarian who is also an autodidact. He is struggling to become a writer only to see most of his efforts in vain. He speculates that once he or any other writer sends a manuscript off to publishers there is an evil machinery which puts it in a new envelope and sends it back, rejecting it without the right to appeal.

Since Martin Eden’s artistic abilities are developing all throughout the novel, this puts it in the Kuenstlerroman category, where one of the central themes is about the formation and development of a young artist into a mature one.

While Jack London was an adept of socialism and worker’s rights, his character has the opposite views. Martin Eden considers socialism to be a slave morality, following the lines of Nietzsche and his individualistic approach. However, Jack London was actually trying to make an attack against individualism with his main character and that it was one of the book’s most important motifs. He stated that he was both surprised and disappointed to see that no reviewer managed to catch that.

While the struggle of the young artist and the path to maturity is not a new theme, the master of fiction Jack London manages to create an accurate and unique portrait of a proletarian who plays against all odds. Readers will certainly enjoy Martin Eden and this pursuit of self-education and accomplishment in a world so different than him.

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