Jack London tell the short story of a man traveling the Yukon trail. As this man starts the trail, he is easily on his way passing every challenge thrown at him. It is 75 degrees below zero. The man seems to be forgetting about the dangers of travelling alone on the Yukon at night in the harsh winter. All of this does not seem to matter as he is overly excited to go see his boys at a camp down the creek. Unfortunately, due to his lack of sense, the man continues down the trail as he is starting to freeze and feel the effects of the cold weather. Later in the story, London states that the man has a traveling companion. This traveling companion is a native wolf dog. Some readers may get the feeling that the dog may symbolize something in the story. Throughout the entire text, …show more content…
The main theme of London 's "To Build a Fire," is man versus nature. The man travels alone with just a native dog hoping to survive, ending up not making it through the harsh winter weather and ending up dying. Through the whole story everything keeps going downhill. For instance, the one good moment in the story, when he gets the fire lit, is soon accompanied by the worst moment when the fire is put out because of the snow falling on the fire from the trees above the fire. If the man would have just placed the fire in a more open spot and not under a canopy of trees this wouldn 't have happened. Instead, the man thinking instinctively and not out of the box, places it under the trees where the branches are easily located so he doesn’t have to travel far in the cold. Because of this very action, he might have practically taken his own life. He tried to light another fire in a different location, but it was too late. The cold had taken him over and his hands were too numb to be able to light the match to start the fire. If the man would have just thought about what would happen after he lit the fire this would not have happened, and he might have survived his adventure and seen his boys at the
Fire what do you think of fire in our world? destruction, unemployment, light. In this book fire represents so much more than just that. In the book fire shows up many times. why heck the firefighters don’t even stop fires anymore they start them.
In the book, Fahrenheit 451 the author uses fire as a allusion and compares it a lot with the personalities of the main characters. I think the role of fire slightly changes from the beginning to the end of the novel. In the beginning, it was shown as a way of pleasure towards the mindless destruction they caused to people and the books that meant nothing to them. Which later changed to be seen as a possibility of a new beginning, like the old saying, “When a door closes, a window opens,” but in this case, the characters open that ‘window’ by burning their past. For instance, in the beginning of the novel the main character, Montag, clearly states, “It was a pleasure to burn.
Allison McNatt L.James Adv. Eng. 10 XX September 2023 “To Build a Fire ” The heartbreaking narrative of a man who chooses to travel alone through the dangerous terrain of the Yukon, displays a dangerous decision to travel alone.
At the end of the story though the main characters instincts are not strong enough and that is what ends up killing him. In reality he is unaware of the many things waiting ahead for him in that freezing forest. An elder man tried to tell him that it is dangerous to go alone
Compare and Contrast The short story, "Powder", by Tobias Wolff, focuses on a boy and his father. While on a skiing trip, the two get held back by a snowstorm. In "To Build a Fire", by Jack London, a man and a wolf dog are stuck outside in temperatures that are 75 below zero. These two stories involve a risky journey through the cold winter temperatures, with attempts to reach safety.
Fire is a symbol that is seen throughout the novel, and over the course of the story, it represents multiple ideas. In the beginning, fire respresented destruction and power. Montag and the other firemen used fire as a tool to burn away anything undesired, such as books, knowledge, and even people. It was the fireman’s job to destroy anything that was causing unhappiness or discomfort. Fire became something to fear, and this fear was how firemen, like Beatty, became so powerful.
Throughout the beginning of the novel, Ralph is the leader of the fight to keep and maintain the fire, but he is starting to give up hope and lets the fire die. Lastly, fire symbolizes hope during the end of the novel. Jack and most of the other boys have turned on Ralph and want to “hunt” him. They decided that the best way to get Ralph to come to them on the beach was to light the whole forest on fire so Ralph would be forced out to the beach. Ralph was trying to run out of the forest as “the roar of the forest rose to thunder and a tall bush directly in his path burst into a great fan-shaped fan.
To Build a Fire” and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. The settings in these stories, the Yukon in “To Build a Fire” and an island in the south Atlantic in “The Most Dangerous Game”, take a toll on the main characters in a very different fashion. Both of these short stories provide excellent demonstrations of this topic but the most obvious are the environment The Man is in, the, application of nature in Rainsford’s survival, Connells animal-like description of Rainsford, and the symbol of fire. We see in “To Build a Fire” that The Man is constantly plagued by the icy tundra he finds himself in.
Being isolated can affect people in many ways. In "To Build a Fire", the protagonist, a man traveling along the Yukon trail, is isolated in terms of his separation from civilization. Furthermore, in "An Episode of War," the protagonist, a lieutenant, is isolated in a terms of his medical condition. The protagonists' different forms of isolation effect them in differing ways.
To conclude, Golding shows how the fire can be just as destructive in the wrong hands as helpful in the
The narrator describes the Yukon Territory as 75-degrees below freezing and being a highly treacherous for anyone to travel alone (2). By introducing this hostile environment, London creates tension in the reader as they begin to question the man’s safety in the freezing cold temperatures, After the man falls into the river and starts to freeze to death, he builds a fire in order to survive. As the fire grows and the warmth spreads, the snow on a tree falls, knocking out his fire. Through struggles such as this one, suspense is created due to the severity of the danger the man faces and the risks involved in the
The author continuously repeats how cold the temperature is, painting a picture of a kind of loneliness and cruel (surrounding conditions). He also relates the man 's state of being along the mood of the story. "He was not much given to thinking. " He had only mind to reaching his goal and not much thought about the temperature. "
From this you can see that the man and dog share many different and similar thoughts on their journey through the Yukon Trail. The man and dog think differently in some situations like when the man or chechaquo(New comer) was trying to kill the dog. The man and dog also think similarly in other situations like, they both have the same idea of survival. For example, the man and dog both think the same about the fire. Therefore, the man and dog have different and similar thoughts while strugglings to get to the other side of camp were the boys
If man were to face nature, man will always lose if not accompanied by another. The powers of nature are much stronger than a single human body. Sometimes nature can be cruel, and other times it can be beautiful. In the story of, “To Build a Fire”, the character faces nature head on, alone. He had no company other than the dog that followed him around.
The short story, To Build A Fire by Jack London demonstrates the man’s powerlessness compared to the forces of nature. It is the man’s ego that prompts him to challenge nature by embarking on the journey while he understands well that he will encounter the full wrath of extreme weather condition. Additionally, the man 's powerlessness is seen in the setting of the action, his lack of identity and the author 's depiction of the mightiness of nature. Besides, the protagonist effort to overcome nature is faced with equal efforts from the latter to defeat him as seen in his failure to light a fire. It is for these reasons that this paper maintains that the story, To Build A Fire by Jack London, is a true manifestation of the conflict between man and nature and which although the former initiate he losses to the latter in