Wisely, I think, London does not attempt to answer those questions. He does not even go any further, in the fiction, in articulating the statement that gives rise to those questions in the reader. Instead, he remains in contact with the plot, its material conditions, its action, and its reality; he does not float away into abstractions, which would interrupt the ‘dream’ that is the story, but continues to produce that dream’s phenomena, and the consequences that belong to it.