Jack London's To Build A Fire

The story I will be analyzing and evaluating in my essay is To Build A Fire by Jack London. Jack London was a man who struggled much early in his life and he drew upon those harsh experiences in his writing. Though his life had a difficult beginning, Jack aspired to make a better man of himself and after great tribulation made his mark as an incredible writer. The following is an analysis and evaluation of what I think is one of his more intriguing stories.
The story To Build A Fire takes place in the freezing harsh wilderness of Alaska. This story illustrates a couple of themes. One, is man’s stubbornness to listen to reason and thinking that he knows best despite being provided with sound advice. Another main theme which was masterly depicted by Jack London is that of humankind’s inability to overcome nature. I will explore both of these in the following paragraph as they went hand in hand together in this story.

The story starts out with the man in the frozen wilderness and right away the man is out of his element.

The first incident that depicts the first theme, man’s stubbornness to listen to reason, is when he takes off his glove to eat and his fingers quickly become very numb in this barren and harsh landscape. It is astonishingly cold but the man does not deeply ponder this fact as he is not given to observing the different workings of life as significant, but instead merely views them as cold facts. He had neglected to build a fire, at more than fifty degrees below zero! The man from Sulphur Creek had told him that it was very cold before he set out and he had laughed at

him.
The incident that depicts the second theme is when the man must build a fire to warm himself and dry out his footgear after falling through the snow. He must succeed in building a fire the first time as it is 75 degrees below zero and his feet are wet and if he should fail at such a dire moment in time, he might as well be writing his own death sentence. He succeeds in building a fire the first time and smiles thinking he is safe and that he has beaten the old man and his tireless wisdom once again. The man from Sulphur Creek was adamant in saying that one must not travel when the weather is lower than 50 degrees below zero alone and yet the man has done it and he has survived. Until the avalanche of snow from the tree under which he had built his fire unleashes its load and extinguishes his fire and more than that, extinguishes his chances of surviving in this frozen wasteland.
Jack London’s To Build A Fire is a story that exposes some of man’s greatest faults; stubbornness, to one’s own fault, and inability to fight and win against the tremendous forces of nature. However, this was not a simple struggle against nature, London chose a setting that would pit man against one of the fiercest of elements in nature which is the frigid, unrelenting, flesh eating cold of winter wastelands and he chose a character that depicted man in all of foolish self- proclaimed greatness to create a story that the reader could not just read but also feel. It is this way that Jack London’s literary choices affected the story as a whole and allowed this story to be a timeless tale for the ages.