Naturalism And Determinism In Jack London's To Build A Fire

His mood was so wretched, and his visage was so wasted. His heart was full of sorrow. His features burnt by frost and by sunshine” (George,77). This description not only subverts his former brave and heroic image., but also reflects how difficult his journey was. Even though Gilgamesh is a hero and omnipotent, he is also afraid of death as ordinary people

He had no common sense, and he had no business going into Alaska with his Romantic silliness. He made a lot of mistakes based on arrogance. I don’t admire him at all for his courage nor his noble ideas. Really, I think he was just plain crazy,” shows that Shaun believes Chris had no common sense in his doing for leaving society for the wild. I agree with Callarman’s position of thinking “ he had no common sense” and that he was “bright and Ignorant” because Chris thinks he did not have much to offer in his society, ditched all his possessions to take a trip into the Alaskan Wilderness and did not have much common sense or survival skills.

Jack London 's "To Build a Fire" is a short story that uses the literally element of naturalism to describe how an individual 's choices he or she makes ultimately will decide their fate in the future. In the short story the main character 's ego and lack of experience overcomes him, as he tries to travel through Yukon Trail in the middle of winter unprepared and ill-equipped. He made the poor choice of ignoring all the warning signs, leading up to, and during his journey. The man 's selfishness and arrogance lead to his unfortunate outcome. The story is set in the Yukon during the great Klondike Gold Rush, when over 100,000 people moved to the Yukon Territory in search of gold.

However, Jake Barnes could never achieve and participate in this craze due to the injury he sustained during WWI. This damaged his self-esteem and due to the location of the injury, his masculinity, “Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror...of all the ways to be wounded” (Hemingway 38). Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that one must achieve self-esteem before self-actualization. Therefore, “Jake will never achieve the psychological stability he craves because he finally accepts...philosophies about his injury...these ideas...will always leave him vulnerable to the fear that he will...be an invalid” (Fore). Not only does this ruin his self-esteem but ruins his relationships as well since he is impotent as a result.

"But it didn 't matter, much after all. What were frosted cheeks, a bit painful, that was all they were never serious." The story uses ties to how bad the weather is, to the man 's empty cares and concerns. The sudden change in (related to where mountains, rivers, cities, etc., are located) structure shows a change in the man 's mood and extreme tiredness of danger in (the health of the Earth/the surrounding conditions) around him. 2.)

Since it did both that tells us as peers, he is in a dangerous environment where he shouldn’t travel alone. Since the protagonist subconscious mind fails to get an understanding how easy it is to freeze to death in the conditions he is in. He continues to go further down his menacing path to failure. Due to his lack of imagination, the character will not recognize how much of a threat nature will be as he dig deeper down his path. Since he fails at recognizing the strength of nature almost in a disrespectful manner, its treacherous force will soon hit him hard.

However, the theme of the foolishness of man can be changed to the worthlessness of man by redirecting the primary narrative perspective from the man’s thoughts to his actions. Had the narrator been in third person omnipresent, allowing the reader to see the actions instead of the thoughts of the man, the reader would have realized the worthlessness of the man 's self-imposed task. The omniscient narrative subtly implied this in the reference to the conversation with the older man of Sulphur Creek: “He was somewhat frightened. He stamped forcefully until the feeling returned to his feet. It certainly was cold, was his thought.

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

Along with the way that Huck treated Jim, Twain made him sound like an unintelligent thing, not a human being but just a thing. There were many problems that Jim faced with Huck and one is specifically pointed out as the reason The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a racist tale and not one that started to show racial tolerance. During the escape of Jim from Aunt Sally’s house Huck devises a simple plan to get Jim out of the barn safely But then Tom comes along and makes the plan much more complicated and insanely dangerous for Jim. Huck instead of stopping Tom from doing this plan asks him why they should do a complicated plan that might hurt Jim and then decides to revert back to his old self and toy with Jim. After all the morale improvements that Huck has made in the end Jim is still being toyed with instead of treated like the free human being he was.

His inability to grasp the scope of this new world blinds him to both the advice of others and the world around him. While he observes “the changes in the creek, the curves and bends and timber jams” and pays careful attention to where he places his feet, his subtle mistakes shine through. London says, “He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.” He does not bother to linger on the repercussions of the cold, “Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.” He ignores the advice of the experienced prospector even though he had been “very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.” There are reasons you don’t go out without a partner in sub-zero