My Interpretation
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In Jack London’s “Moon-Face” there is no happy ending. The story is highly naturalistic, mainly because of the warring emotions of the narrator and the harsh reality of the situation at the conclusion of the story, a reality that any reader would definitely not want to face. Through the narrator’s characterization of John Claverhouse, the first-person narrative the story is written in, and the unforgiving setting, I believe the theme of “Moon-Face” is quite clear: jealousy can be a powerful and even dangerous emotion, something that can drive anyone into the deepest depths of insanity and depravity.
Even though the victim in “Moon-Face” is likeable and is a good person, he still falls victim, in the end, to the narrator. With the way John Claverhouse is characterized in the story, the man the narrator calls “Moon-Face,” the reader can really begin to understand where the narrator’s hatred stems from. Claverhouse is always happy – he is the quintessential cup-half-full type of guy – and the narrator really hates this about the man. The narrator is extraordinarily jealous of Claverhouse’s happiness; he doesn’t understand it and he doesn’t want to: “What right had such a man to be happy,” the narrator asks in the beginning of the story (London 3). He then goes on to say this: “Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were all right, curse him!” (London 3). As the story progresses the narrator’s hatred of Claverhouse become more pronounced and more insane, even to the point where he criticizes even the name: “Then there was that name – Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I asked myself that question” (London 7). Up until the very moment Claverhouse realizes he is going to die, he is happy, and this is what initially drives the narrator to kill.
As I have just stated above, the narrator is most definitely insane – this is clear from the very beginning of the story, and because “Moon-Face” is written in a first-person narrative, the reader really gets a sense of how crazy the narrator really is. His obsession with Claverhouse is uncomfortable, which is something it is intended to be. At one point, the narrator swears he can hear Claverhouse’s laugh in the night, keeping him awake, taunting him (a delusion I find very similar to Poe’s equally insane narrator in the “Tell-Tale Heart”):
It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an enormous rasp. (London 3)
Another example of the narrator’s obsession with bringing only misery into Claverhouse’s life is when he starts conjuring up ideas of how to ruin Claverhouse’s life in order to make him unhappy. It gets so bad that, at one point, after Claverhouse’s dog is poisoned, the narrator decides to get a mortgage transferred to Claverhouse: “But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and bran destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it” (London 7). Because of this, the narrator causes there to be a foreclosure on the house, and it is eventually taken from Claverhouse. When this deed doesn’t cause the response from Claverhouse that is wanted (the reader cannot even be sure Claverhouse is still as happy as he once was, mainly because the narrator is undependable), the narrator decides to kill him, making it abundantly clear how insane he really is.
The setting is important in “Moon-Face.” If it wasn’t for where the story took place, the narrator could not have possibly gotten away with the crimes that he commits. Most of Jack London’s fiction is considered to be naturalistic. His characters are always at the mercy of their surroundings. At the climax of “Moon-Face,” John Claverhouse is illegally fishing for trout with Bellona, the new dog the narrator gave him. In the narrator’s description of the area where the river can be found, the reader can really get a sense of how secluded the surroundings really are:
“I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my pipe” (London 13).
This river is the ideal place for the narrator to finally kill off Claverhouse. Even earlier in the story the narrator takes advantage of his surroundings in order to ruin his adversary’s life. Because the setting is so pastoral, the narrator has the opportunity to run off Claverhouse’s cattle, poison his dog, and even burn up his crop before the harvest without risking getting caught. In London’s fiction, especially in stories like “Moon-Face,” the author wants the reader to know that sometimes nature can be a helpful aid in some of man’s most heinous crimes.
“Moon-Face” is not an uplifting story; it does not comfort or cheerfully entertain – this is not its purpose. The purpose of “Moon-Face” is to show what some people are willing to do and to risk in order to make other people miserable. John Claverhouse is an innocent person, someone who never did any wrong to the narrator. Even so, Claverhouse looses his life, anyway. The fact that the narrator is never caught at the end of “Moon-Face” makes it clear that sometimes the good do not always prevail, which sounds harsh but, in the end, is just another reality of life. The eerie way “Moon-Face” ends is unfair, but it is also, in some cases even today, realistic: “No more does his infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night’s sleep deep” (London 15).