Tarzan of the Apes - Chapter 01

Tarzan of the Apes is very much a product of its age: replete with bloodthirsty natives and a bulky, swooning American Negress, and haunted by what zoo specialists now call charismatic megafauna (great beasts snarling, roaring, and stalking, most of whom would be out of place in a real African jungle). Burroughs countervails such incorrectness, however, with some rather unattractive representations of white civilization–mutinous, murderous sailors, effete aristos, self-involved academics, and hard-hearted cowards. At Tarzan’s heart rightly lies the resourceful and hunky title character, a man increasingly torn between the civil and the savage, for whom cutlery will never be less than a nightmare. The passages in which the nut-brown boy teaches himself to read and write are masterly and among the book’s improbable, imaginative best. How tempting it is to adopt the ten-year-old’s term for letters–“little bugs”! And the older Tarzan’s realization that civilized “men were indeed more foolish and more.