50 pages • 1 hour read
Will HobbsJason's Gold
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Outfits
A stampeder’s “outfit” consists of all the food, supplies, tools, clothing, and gear they will need to travel to the Klondike and subsist there as they dig and pan for gold. As the novel proceeds, Jason soon learns that the Canadian Mounties have specifications for the weight and contents of one’s outfit; for example, concerned about starvation, they insist that each person entering Canada have at least 700 pounds of food. An outfit is a motif that highlights the ironic burden each stampeder carries with them: The pace and ease of the trip substantially increase without a heavy outfit to slow them down, but without a heavy outfit, arrival in Canada is pointless, as food and supplies are unavailable.
In keeping with the novel’s many ironies, some of the seemingly best-equipped stampeders meet with quick failure or loss of investment on the trails over the Alaskan mountains; either they cannot move a heavy outfit over White Pass and give up, or they must abandon their pack animals at the foot of the Chilkoot Pass and “pack” their outfits over the steep pass with the help of packers or, if going solo, one load at a time. This method works for those in good physical condition and with the necessary motivation to make multiple grueling trips, like Jason and Jack London.
For Jason, the outfit also represents the threat of a can’t-win scenario. At first, no one will take him on their Yukon River journey since he has no outfit to pass the checkpoint. Once he acquires an outfit, however, and struggles mightily to bring it over the mountain, he still has no luck in acquiring a partner with whom to boat. When he takes a defeated man’s canoe, he ironically must leave behind almost half of the goods he labored to bring that far. The burden and ironic necessity of one’s outfit and the unexpected ways in which it impacts success or failure help to support the theme of The Dangerous Allure of Wealth.
Literature
The novel includes a motif of literature that helps to develop several characters, most importantly Jason and Jack London. One of Jason’s few possessions on his way to Alaska is a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s adventure story, The Seven Seas; he is glad to have ownership of the book even after being robbed in Juneau, which highlights his love of learning and stories. Jack London is reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species when Jason first meets him, and the two connect over their shared recognition of Darwin’s theories. Later, Jason trades his copy of the Kipling novel with Jack for the outfit left behind by Captain Shepherd, now in Jack’s care; that Jack would equate a worn copy of The Seven Seas with the value of an outfit of over 1,000 pounds demonstrates his respect for good adventure stories. The motif continues as Jason and Charlie rely on issues of Scientific American to occupy their time in the cabin throughout the winter, and in Jack’s choice to become a writer once home from his trek to the Klondike.
The motif serves several purposes in the novel. As literary allusions, these references help to define and characterize the time period, revealing the tenor of society’s general knowledge base in the closing days of the 1800s. The importance that Jack and Jason attach to writing helps to define their characters, as it shows a particular interest in literature and helps to present them as multi-dimensional. Jack’s love of stories and the value he places on them serve as a foundation for his choice to leave the North and pursue writing as a career, while Jason’s love of adventure stories encourages him to go on the adventure in the first place; these points connect to the theme of The Transformational Power of Adventure.
The Klondike Goldfields
As Jason’s intended destination, the Klondike goldfields represent the subject of his quest. This region is comprised of the Klondike River and its streams and tributaries such as Bonanza Creek, where Carmack and others first struck it rich. The goldfields initially symbolize the distant goal in any quest, reachable only after surmounting sizable challenges. Obstacles preventing easy passage to the goldfields include the mountains, the climate and conditions, the lakes, rapids, and waterways, and winter. Jason and 100,000 other stampeders think of the goldfields as the answer to all of their troubles; with wealth available for the taking, the goldfields will bring them lives of leisure, improved positions in society, and an end to financial worries and wage dependence.
Once Jason finally arrives in Dawson City and sees the Klondike goldfields, however, the symbolic meaning of this location shifts. Jason sees a mutilated region of land that reminds him of a scarred battlefield. Far from glamorous, the area is brutally ugly and serves as visual evidence of man’s greed:
Along the valley floor, not a vestige of greenery remained. A creek splashed its way through ditches and diversions, among heaps and heaps of bare gravel and much more machinery than seemed likely here at the ends of the earth: rockers and boilers, steam engines, winches, pumps, and hoses. (198)
At this point, the goldfields symbolize the exploitation of the land and environment and ironically represent the collective misguidedness of so many stampeders like Jason. As such, the Klondike goldfields symbolize The Exploitative Nature of Greed.
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