Characterism In Jack London's To Build A Fire

If developed the right way, the setting can play an important role in a story like this. London builds his setting up quickly, within the first words of this story. The story is set in the wintertime with no sign of the sun, at the Yukon Trail. A deadly and extremely cold area in the country of Canada. In the story, the narrator states, “Day had dawned cold and gray when the man turned aside

In Jack London's “To Build A Fire” the story follows a man and his dog in the Klondike and their obstacles of trying to get to the boys which are his compatriots. The story revolves around the winter and how mankind reacts to the wild. The author uses nature to illustrate the poem’s tone by vilifying nature and using it as an obstacle.

The words and phrases Jack London uses in To Build a Fire gives rich meaning to the story. The story covers a man's fatal journey through the Yukon wilderness with his dog. The further the reader goes into the story, the more the reader learns about the man's personality. The man is young and quite arrogant in his ability to survive in the extreme cold. In the end, the man's misjudgments lead to his early death.

Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Basically characters can be studied through their relationship with their environment. A lot of jack London’s work was based on naturalism, and “To build a fire” was no different. The story starts off with an unnamed man in Yukon (where he is foreign) where it is more than 50 degrees below zero. "The man's red beard and moustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly

The story “To Build a Fire” narrates about a man who decides to travel through freezing temperatures of Yukon and becomes a victim of the unforgiving power of nature. The temperatures reading 170 below the freezing point, the man decides to light a fire. Having several attempts to light the fire, he decides to run around like a “chicken with its head cut off” and finally comes to rest to meet his death with dignity. All that the man is trying to do is to find the meaning of his existence.

Jack London’s story “To Build A Fire” is set at Yukon during the gold rush. A man is walking by foot to meet his friends at Old Camp in Henderson Creek with his wolf-like dog in freezing temperatures. The man who has a “lack of imagination” is a newcomer to the Yukon environment, thereby unprepared for his journey in seventy-five degrees below zero temperature. The weather being colder than he anticipated, causing frostbite and numbness, gives the man no choice but “to build a fire”. The man doesn’t want to lose time, so after warming up he continues to travel. The dog doubts the journey, and continues to travel instead of sticking to the safe warm fire. When the man reaches Henderson Creek, he walks across a frozen river. He then reflects on a conversation with an old man from Sulphur Creek.

lead his readers to believe that the man will suffer a tragedy in the end

There are a multitude of aspects that lend themselves to the setting of any story and if left underdeveloped the setting will feel like a mere passing stranger. In the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, if the author hadn’t devoted so much of the text and placed as much emphasis on the aspects of setting such as place, weather, and atmosphere there would be no story to be told. From the first to the last sentence of the story London forces the reader to submerge themselves in the frigid Yukon and walk alongside the freezing protagonist and his canine companion. For instance, in the opening line of the story London sets the overall setting and tone for the reader by illustrating, “Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray” (London 127).

A writer named Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 (Verde). He has written many stories, "he wrote about 200 short stories"(Werlock). For example, "The Cruise of the Snark," "White Silence" and the one we will be talking about "To Build a Fire." According to Robert Evan, Jack London eventually became one of the most popular American writers in the world. In the story "To Build a Fire," written by Jack London. He uses two characters, a man and dog to express the theme of arrogance throughout the story, the author Jack London was able to use his experience with him getting lost while the temperature were dropping to help give himself a idea to write this story.

The textual evidence of the setting is significant to the story, To Build a Fire, written by Jack London because without it we would not know how severe the man’s situation was. In the story, London shares the old man is hiking on the Yukon trail which is located around the Alaskan, Canadian border so we can already infer the temperatures are going to drop far below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. In, To Build a Fire, London explained that although it was a cloudless day, you could still not see the sun in the sky which told us that it was most likely difficult for the man to know what time of the day it exactly was so he wore a watch which in the beginning of the story read nine o’clock. Throughout the text London also gave more specific details and

Literature has always been a means to not only tell a story, but to expresses one's feelings and beliefs. Authors use many unique ways to deliver a theme, and sometimes they do it quite spectuarly. To Build a Fire, by Jack London, is a great example of this. It is a story littered with a plethora of valuable messages and themes displayed in meaningful ways. The most prevalent theme in the story is that humans are completely outmatched compared to nature and that they are arrogant to its true power. The way Twain portrays this is through repeated lines. These repeated lines promulgate the main theme of human arrogance and the power of nature throughout the story.

The fire is vital to his life. The character is not ready for the setting and he has to suffer through its conditions. The setting has the greatest influence on the plot. London tells us just how cold it really is.

Introduction "To Build a Fire," is a deplorable short story and film by Jack London. It centers on a man who made a choice to travel and explore Yukon alone. The environments of the place was not good as the temperatures were subfreezing. The forces of nature are not favorable and friendly at all. During his adventure, the man’s feet become wet when he falls into the water of a hot spring through the ice (London 122).

Fire burns red hot, it’s a source of warmth and in some cases comfort. In the story To Build a Fire by Jack London, fire brings new feelings to a numb man every time he makes one. The man starts out calm and uncaring to his surroundings and the cold, but be the time of the last fire he built, he was panicking and distraught. As the fire thawed out the man’s fingers and toes it also thawed out his heart and made the man feel more than he ever wanted to. At the beginning of the man’s journey before he made a fire, he was undeterred by the cold, “But all this-the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sub from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all-made no impression on the man” (London 302).

As far as plot is concerned the setting plays as large a role as the wandering man does. The plot of the story is a simple one: a man who should have heeded the warnings of others must struggle to survive treacherous terrain and reach his friends at their camp. However London's attention to detail creates a desolate wasteland that in the end destroys the unlucky hiker. London's words create a chill as they describe the "far-reaching hairline trail" of which the man must follow (London 118). He also describes the temperature as "a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against" which is presumably appropriate for seventy-five degrees below zero (London 118-119). The plot becomes void if the man has not the enemy and companionship of the setting therefore producing a heavy reliance on that setting.