The Setting of To Build a Fire by Jack London

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The Setting of To Build a Fire by Jack London

No matter what type of story you are reading, setting always plays a key element in producing the desired effect. Jack London's short story To Build A Fire provides an excellent example of this. In this story, a man hikes across a snow and ice covered plane towards the encampment where he is supposed to meet up with more travelers like himself. The setting of this story is one of the northernmost most areas of the earth, the Yukon. The man must hike across this area for approximately thirty-six miles before he reaches the camp at which he is expected. The constantly dropping temperature further complicates the man's hike. When he begins his journey at nine o'clock in the morning it is at the day's high of fifty degrees, below. At the man's time of death the temperature had made a sharp drop to seventy-five below. This setting brings a sense of harsh reality and an idea of how fragile the human body is to the piece.

In this story, the setting carries more than one function. It could be said that the setting acts like a double...

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