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Jack London's To Build A Fire

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Jack London’s 1908 short story “To Build a Fire”, focuses on a man who is traveling through the Yukon in -°F weather, alone. “To Build a Fire” is set in Yukon, Alaska during its colder months, with no sun. The protagonist known only as “the man” has no first hand experience in such weather therefore underestimates the danger involved. After accidentally stepping knee-high in spring water, the man attempts to build a fire to dry himself off. At first he is seemingly successful in building the fire, until snow from the branches above fall onto the flames and blots them out. When trying a second time the man is too cold to hold anything and can not successfully light the fire. The man then becomes frantic and attempts to run back to camp, but the Yukon is much too large, and the man eventually freezes. The mood in this story is very …show more content…

London describes the landscape in great detail saying “North and south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hairline that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island" (850). This quote contributes to the unemotional, and indifferent mood that we as readers get from the story. It represents the attitude nature has toward the man. The Yukon is an immensely vast landscape, "this dark hairline was the trail -the main trail- that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and the salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael, on Bering Sea a thousand miles and half a thousand more" (850). This shows that even when the man attempted to run back to camp he never had a chance. Nature never gave the man a chance. The landscape is so large that he would never have reached civilization in

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