As background knowledge for a full understanding of the novel White Fang, the reader should be familiar with London's earlier and equally famous novel, The Call of the Wild (1903). While London did not intend these novels to be sequential, or that one should follow another, there is, nevertheless, a thematic relationship that exists between the two. For example, in the earlier Call of the Wild, London treats the matter of a civilized dog's being converted to the ways of the wild in the primitive North. At the end of the novel, the previously civilized dog has become wild, and he has sired a new strain of wild dogs, a breed that is part dog and part wild wolf. In contrast, the novel White Fang (1906) begins with a previously tamed dog seen in his native habitat, functioning as a wild beast. In the first three chapters, this animal is simply referred to as a "she-wolf." We are not implying that London deliberately conceived this novel as a continuation of the preceding novel, but merely that he is using a situation analogous to that in the earlier novel.
Even though the first three chapters of White Fang are referred to as Part One, they have very little to do with the subsequent chapters of the book. For example, Henry and Bill are never heard of again, and Lord Alfred's corpse is left suspended in the tree. As is often the case with many novels, a certain portion of a novel can be published as a separate entity, and these first three chapters (in Part One) stand so independently from the rest of the novel that they can be looked upon as a separate short story.
However, in relationship to the entirety of the novel White Fang, these chapters do present dramatically and forcefully the desolation and isolation against which the main body of the novel is set. In other words, the reader is introduced rather dramatically to the harsh, frozen Northland, where all types of life struggle desperately for mere existence.
