In Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, an arrogant man sets off on the Yukon Trail with only a dog and minimal supplies. Even though, this is his first time actually experiencing the Alaskan winter he believes he is a veteran. He goes out expecting it to be fifty below, but soon realizes it is a lot colder. After he falls through an ice patch he is forced to build a fire in order to dry his moccasins off. He builds the fire under a tree which results in a snow pile to put out the fire. Now it is critical in building the second fire in order not to freeze to death. His hands and fingers were totally numb, but he was able to light the whole pack of matches. A large piece of wet plant landed in the fire, scattering the fire inevitable smothering …show more content…
However, this confidence is misplaced due to the lack of imagination. When in such harsh conditions, hypothermia makes the body and mind lose control which makes it unreliable (Widdicombe). In “To Build a Fire”, once the man loses his first fire after a pile of snow smothered it, he tries to build another. This is nearly impossible due to no feeling in his hand and feet. He could not feel the tree bark and could not pick up the matches when he dropped them. Even after his second fire attempt fails, he tries to kill the dog for warmth but could not get his knife. He is essentially useless without a fire due to the extreme cold. Even though the man can do more thing than the dog, like building a fire, the dog has much better instincts. Jack London states “It knew that this was no time for traveling.” In this story, the dog symbolizes natural instinct or reason. He questions every move the man makes. The man and the dog become more similar as the story progresses. The man is muzzled from the tobacco ice; the dog breaks through a hidden ice patch and they break the ice between its toes, so the man seems as much a "toil-slave" as his dog
They say to “always be prepared for unexpected situations,” this represents the man in the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. The man is unprepared because he does not
Nature is always pushing man to his limits. When man heeds the warning signs that nature has to offer and those warnings of other men, he is most likely to conquer nature. When he ignores these warnings, nature is sure to defeat man. To build a fire is a prime example of this scenario. In the short story, “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, an inexperienced traveler in the Yukon travels alone with his dog, even though it is ill advised to do so. The man is strong and smart but nature humbled him during his quest to reach his friends. The man’s inexperience with traveling in the cold subzero temperatures doomed him from the beginning, but his strong focus under extreme pressure and his keen sense of observation are what allows him to survive as long as he did. The ignorance of the old-timer’s words of wisdom slowly haunts him and catches up with him in the end. The man’s disregard for nature’s power is his demise during his journey.
Would you be able to survive in sub zero temperatures by yourself? This is what happened in “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. In the story a man is warned by an old timer not to go hiking by himself in below freezing temperatures. The man ignores the old-timers warning. The man starts hiking up a high earth bank on the Yukon trail.
In To Build a Fire the character needed to get to the camp where his friends are and in Freezing to Death he needed to get to a cabin where also his friends are. The cabin acted like the camp. Both the characters thought about getting to the destination and the warmth that is there. They were in a forest as a setting. In Freezing to Death the person listens to the weather report on the radio.
The man in this story explained to us that we would have trouble, because we can't use our fingers. We also didn't know what the weather was going to be. Just like the man in the story, no matter how the weather was, we had to build attempt to fire. In this project I suspected that I would build a small fire, or no fire at all.
Although fire is linked to human life, as it is essential for survival, not only its use for food, security and warmth, particularly in the extreme cold weather
Jack London’s To Build a Fire follows an unnamed protagonist, who’s only referred to as “the man”, as he travels the Yukon Trail during a severe snow storm. Along with his husky wolf-dog, he determined to meet friends at an old junction by six o’clock. The man, who was warned not travel in the Klondike alone, presses forward through the terrain’s harsh weather. He later falls through the snow in what looked to be a secure spot. With his feet and fingers soaked, he starts a fire and begins drying himself. The man constructs the fire under a spruce tree in order to take its twigs and drop them directly onto the fire. Each time he pulled a twig a branch overturned its load of snow, eventually blotting out the fire. He grabs all his matches and lights them simultaneously to set fire to a piece of bark; it soon goes out. The man decides to kill the dog and use its warm body to restore his circulation, but is unable to kill the animal and lets the dog go. The man attempts to run from the thought of freezing to death but he quickly falls down. He decides he should meet death in a more dignified manner; the man falls off into a calm sleep.
When the narrator introduced the main character of the story, the man, he made it clear that the man was in a perilous situation involving the elements. The man was faced with weather that was 75 degrees below zero and he was not physically or mentally prepared for survival. London wrote that the cold "did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold."(p.1745) At first when the man started his journey to the camp, he felt certain that he could make it back to camp before dinner. As the trip progressed, the man made mistake after mistake that sealed his fate. The man's first mistake was to step into a pool of water and soak his legs to the knees. This blunder forced the man to build a fire to dry his wet socks and shoes so his feet would not freeze and become frostbitten. When the man began to build a fire he failed to notice that he was doing so under a large, snow laden spruce tree where he was getting his firewood. When the man had a small fire that was beginning to smolder the disturbance to the tree caused the snow to tumble to the ground and extinguish the fire. "It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake. He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open."(1750).
Obviously that was not the situation which was meant to occur. The cold served as a lesson to be taught to all explorers who would set foot into the never-ending winter from that day on. The continuous efforts that the man made to start a fire symbolize his will to survive. No will however is match for mother nature. The suffering man took on the role as a great teacher and hopefully preserver of life for generations to come.
In “To Build A Fire”, the main conflict throughout is man versus nature although it would be inaccurate to say that nature goes out of its way to assault the man. The fact of the matter is, nature would be just as cold without the man's presence regardless of him being there .The environment as a whole is completely indifferent to the man, as it frequently is in naturalist literature. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way, and it will not notice if he perishes. In the same way, the dog does not care about the man, only about itself. Ironically enough though, as the man was dying he was getting upset toward the dog because of its natural warmth, the instincts that it had, and its survival skills and those were the elements that the man lacked for survival. It is ironic that the man had to die in order to find out that man's fragile body cannot survive in nature's harsh elements, regardless of a human’s natural over-confidence and psychological strength.
Literature focuses on many aspects to form a coherent and captivating story, mainly those aspects retaining to characters and conflict. Within any story, a conflict arises for a character to overcome which drives the whole story. Conflict, the struggle against many forces of multiple varieties, creates the obstacle or issue a character must face to advance past the problem. In "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, conflict plays a major role in the story. The conflicts of man fighting against nature and man against himself present the struggles the unidentified man from "To Build a Fire" faces and attempts to overcome. These conflicts of man and nature influence the whole story and the fate of the character.
Jack London creates a setting that is hostile and “cold”. The story is set in the wilderness of the frozen Yukon, during the harsh winter months, when “there was no sun nor hint of sun” in the sky. The character that London introduces is isolated from the world. “The man” doesn't have a companion; only the dog that follows him.
In the short story “To Build A Fire”, by Jack London, Tells a story of a man who must brace himself through the harsh weather of negative 60 degrees in the tundra of Alaska. A native husky accompanies him through the 9 hours of hiking. His confidence allows him to look past any sort of doubt of his ability to reach camp before dark. The man then finds himself in a tense situation when he built a fire under a spruce tree. Snow falls from the trees branches and lands on top of the fire the man had rigorously built. The man is optimistic of the situation until he realizes his hands have become frozen. He accepts his fate and admits he made a mistake of ignoring the old timers warnings. London’s central idea suggests that pride and vain thoughts will cloud someone's ability to see their limitations and details that go unnoticed. You become clumsy.
Providing the separation between survival and death. setting was the most important factor in "Building a Fire" by Jack London. Works Cited and Consulted Hendricks, King. Jack London: Master Craftsman of the Short Story. Logan: Utah State U P. 1966.
I agree with Karen Rhodes observation that to build afirecan be interpreted as the story of a man in the journey of human existence. However, I think her view of to build a fire as an American experience comes from the fact that she is an American. I agree with her theory that the Man's death in the end was due to the nature of the man and his environment. The protagonist in to build a fire did nor have any grasp of the danger he was in. he tried to reason himself through it all. He thought, " Maybe, if he ran on, his feet will thaw out; and anyway if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. (Jack London, 157).