"To Build a Fire"

Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire" is primarily a Naturalism work. It shows a fine example of Darwin's natural selection theories. "To Build a Fire" is about a man who is traveling on the Yukon Trail. He is trying to get back to the boys at his camp by six in the evening. It seems like he might accomplish this, but then things start going wrong. This is where the "survival of the fittest" comes in. The man has a dog with him. The dog can sense that it is much colder than is safe to be out alone in. The man, however, like an idiot, still believes that it is no lower than fifty below. Turns out, it is seventy five degrees below zero. It takes the man a ridiculous amount of time to figure this out. The cold temperature is just the first in a long string of misfortunes to befall the man. The next thing he does wrong is fall through a thin patch of ice into water up to his knees. He knows that in order to keep his feet from freezing, he needs a fire. Like a newbie, he builds his fire wrong, and it goes out. He cannot get another one started, so he starts to run. He eventually gets too tired and just lies down and dies. Throughout all this, the dog is kept warm by natural means and just runs off into the night when it senses that the man is dead. The dog proved to be the fittest in this case.

An exhaustive amount of detail is put into describing what exactly is happening to the man as he goes along on his journey. A great deal of attention is also spent on the fact that it is cold. "There was no mistake about it, it was cold." (London 408). This attention to detail, particularly to nature, is indicative of Realism. The protagonist of "To Build a Fire" is also a standard issue Realism hero. He seems to be an ordinary man who gets put into a difficult situation. Government and religion do not have anything to do with this story. Nature plays a large role, as stated earlier. It is the antagonist in this case giving us the man vs. nature conflict that was so common to Naturalism. Ultimately, nature wins, but that really is not important to the whole Naturalism thing.

Human nature is not addressed very much in "To Build a Fire". The man and the dog's basic survival instincts are there, but other than that, human nature is not explored in any depth. There is also the basic desire to beat the odds that is present in the man's determination to make it to camp. The American Dream is also irrelevant to this story. Society as a whole is also missing from this story, but that makes sense considering that the man is in the middle of nowhere in weather that no smart man would be out in. There is no civilization for miles, so no form of society is present.

London, Jack. "To Build a Fire." Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Colombus: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 603-614. Print.