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To Build A Fire Analysis

Decent Essays

If you went out one day and out of nowhere you find yourself in a life-or-death situation would it be your fault? People in a life-or-death situation should be held accountable for their actions because most of the time people know that if they do something that can put them in a life-or-death situation then something bad will happen but they still do it willingly. Another person might not agree with this claim and say that people should not be held accountable for their actions. The reason he or she might think this is because if when a person does face a life-or-death situation it might not be entirely their fault. The following reasons are examples of why my claim is stronger. First of all, people should be held accountable for their actions, …show more content…

Above all in the story “To Build a Fire” on paragraph 21, when the man stepped in the hip pool of water he remembered what the old timer had told him, “...that no man travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.” The man remembered what the old timer had told him because he needed help building his fire so that his feet could dry off. This would be an example of why people should be held accountable for their actions because if the old timer had told the man that no one should travel alone below fifty then why didn’t he ask someone to travel with him on the Yukon trail. Another example would be the story “Survival is your Responsibility”. On paragraph 2 the narrator states that “...wilderness-bound end up depending more and more on equipment and less and less on their own competence to deal with dangerous situations in wilderness setting.” What this is basically saying is that people depend more on equipment and they don’t trust themselves to learn skills for the wilderness. In addition the the story “The Cost of Survival” also proves that people willingly put themselves in life-or-death situations. This story is also an example because …show more content…

For example in the story “The Voyage of the James Caird” the crew went through many things throughout their voyage. For example the weather that they went through put them in a life-or-death situation. For instance on page 183 paragraph 19 and 20 the narrator states that, “Every soaking inch of wood, canvas, and line had frozen solid. Encased in icy armor fifteen inches thick, she was sinking like a dead weight.” So because the ship was frozen it was starting to sink to the crew had to chip away the ice so that the boat wouldn’t sink. Another example would be the story “The Endurance and the James Caird in Images” in the pages 197 photo 4 the author wrote in the caption, “After the Endurance sank, the men dragged the James Caird three quarters of a miles to a new camp.The boat weighed approximately 2,000 pounds.” This must have been very hard to drag the boat across the ice one of them could have slipped and hit their head. Moreover, in the story “The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt” this story talks about how sometimes people feel guilty over something that they didn’t or it wasn’t their fault but they still blame themselves. For instance on pages 154 on paragraph 3 the author writes that a Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, “...who was killed by police in the wake of a deadly bar fight

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