![]() ![]() Its major themes (which will all be explained and explored in greater depth here) are determinism over free will the indifference of the environment survival absence of moral judgment instinct over intellectualism a fascination with processes the emphasis of narrative over character depiction of characters in the lower classes and more realistic language befitting such characters and settings. Naturalism was a movement in literature developed largely by Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London in the late 19th-century. " To Build a Fire" is the quintessential naturalist short story. The dog wants to remain with the fire or at least burrow in the snow, but since there is no "keen intimacy" between the two, the dog does not try to warn the man for his own sake it is concerned only with its own well-being. After, the man continues up a fork of the creek. He takes out matches, gathers twigs, and starts a fire. He thinks about the man from Sulphur Creek who gave him advice about the cold he scoffed at it at the time. His frozen beard prevents his biting into it, and his fingers and toes are numb, so he decides to build a fire. ![]() The man helps the dog, briefly removing his mitten in the numbing cold.Ī little after noon, the man takes out his lunch. The dog's feet get wet, and it instinctively licks and bites at the ice that forms between its toes. At one point, suspecting a spring, he pushes the reluctant dog forward to investigate. As he continues, he avoids several springs. If he crashed through one, he could potentially get wet up to his waist, and even wet feet on such a cold day would be extremely dangerous. Though the man does not spend much time thinking, he is observant of the curves and the possibility of dangerous springs in the creek as he wends along it. He realizes his cheeks will "frost," and wishes he had prepared for this, but decides that frosted cheeks are only painful and not very serious. The faintness of the last sled-trail in the snow indicates no one has been by in a month, but the man pays it no mind still, he occasionally thinks that it is very cold, and automatically and unsuccessfully rubs his cheekbones and nose to warm them. He passes over more terrain to the frozen bed of a stream, ten miles from his destination, where he plans to eat lunch. Every warm breath the man exhales increases the ice deposit on his beard. A husky wolf-dog follows him, instinctively depressed by and apprehensive of the cold. The man walks through the thick snow, his unprotected cheekbones and nose feeling numb. ![]() He feels his lunch of biscuits inside his jacket, warming against his skin. He has taken an alternate route to examine the possibility of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He shrugs it off he is going to meet "the boys" by six o'clock at the old claim near Henderson Fork. He spits, and his saliva freezes in mid-air, an indication that is colder than fifty degrees below zero. The cold does not faze the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, since he rarely translates hard facts, such as the extreme cold, into more significant ideas, such as man's frailty and mortality. And the failure of the man to build a fire is the failure of these things, as expressed in the man, and in the brutal cold of nature.A man turns off from the main trail in the Yukon (in Alaska) on an extremely cold, gray morning. The building of a fire thus symbolizes life in the story, but also life through human knowledge, skill, and technology. Building a fire is an act of technical skill and technology, and fire in literature has also often been used as a symbol of knowledge. His body, unlike the dog’s body, does not have the natural resources necessary to survive intense cold without a fire. Even when nothing has gone wrong, the man needs a fire to survive. The man’s first successful fire, which he builds when he eats his lunch, helps to establish its importance early on. Fire is repeatedly associated with life and protection through the word choice of the story. The goal of the protagonist is to build a fire, and as he fails in this later in the story, the man attempts desperate measures to achieve this goal: like lighting all his matches at once, or attempting to kill the dog. The title of the story also keys the reader into the important role of fire in the story. Fire means the difference between life and death in a setting as cold and bleak as the one presented in London’s story. ![]()
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