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The Importance Of Family In Literature

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Family is often defined in most literature as just a mother and father and children living under the same roof. Although many perceive this to be true, family is now branching out beyond blood relatives. Outlooks of family have been relevant in some literature, influencing the idea of family throughout centuries. These sources include Into the Wild, “The Obsession of Chris McCandless”, and “To Build a Fire”. These sources challenge the idea of family and what it means, revealing a new outlook on family. This allows mankind to ask what family really is, thus, asking if family is truly needed in one’s everyday life, or if it’s exigent relationship.
The literature on family suggests that it brings support to burdensome situations in two important ways. First, some of literature states that family gives unconscious mental support. Jack London, in his novel “To Build a Fire”, discusses the idea of the wolf and its ancestors leading it through life. London states that “This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestors had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it inherited the knowledge.”(420). Here London seems to relate the man’s lack of knowledge on coldness to his lack of family. By repeating the word cold, London emphasizes the break between this man and the cold. The repetition of cold can be thought of as the bond between family. Showing how

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