Critical Analysis of the Story:
Introduction:
“To Build A Fire” is a short story by American author Jack London. There are two versions of this story, one published in 1902 and the other in 1908. The story written in 1908 has become an often anthologized classic, while the 1902 story is less well - known. The 1908 version is about an unnamed protagonist who ventures out in the subzero boreal forest of the Yukon Territory, accompanied by his dog, to visit his friends - ignoring warnings from an older man about the dangers of hiking alone. The protagonist underestimates the harsh conditions and slowly begins to freeze to death. After trying and failing to build a fire, he slips into unconsciousness and dies of hypothermia.
.webp "The Story To Build A Fire by Jack London—Critical Analysis") |
| The Story To Build A Fire by Jack London—Critical Analysis |
The 1902 version describes a similar situation, but with a different plot. Though the structure and story line are similar in both, in 1902 the weather is not so cold and horrendous, no dog follows the protagonist, the fire is not doused and the man (named Tom Vincent) suffers only from permanent frostbite and survives to become a more melancholic but wiser person.
The 1908 “To Build A Fire” is an oft - cited example of the naturalist movement that portrays the conflict of man vs. nature. It also reflects what London learnt in the Yukon Territory.
Plot of the Story:
Exposition:
The story takes place in a very severe winter. An unnamed man starts out on an extremely cold, gray morning. The man is unaware of how cold it is and underestimates the danger of the way. He leaves at 9 a.m. and intends to be at the other camp at Henderson Creek by 6 p.m. There is a dog walking at his heels and only the dog seems to realise how extremely cold it is. The man realises that he has never experienced cold like this. He knows that he has to beware of traps of ice.
Rising Action:
Rising action begins when the man, despite all the precautions that he took, gets his feet wet. He succeeds in building another fire, but his fingers are getting too cold to bend or feel anything. When his next attempt similarly fails, the man becomes panicky. The advice of the old - timer reoccurs in the man's head several times. At first he just laughs at it, but as the plot unfolds he starts to realise that the man has spoken the truth. The man manages to calm his fears and tries over and over, but all in vain.
Climax:
The story comes to its climax when the man gets a wild idea. He decides to warm his hands by killing his dog and burying his hands into its warm body. But after making a try, he realises that he has no way of killing it with his hands being numb and senseless. Being really desperate the man starts running to the camp but eventually gives up.
Falling Action:
Then goes the falling action. The man sits down and decides to meet his death with dignity. He lets himself to fall asleep. Before freezing to death he has the visions of his friends finding his dead body. Then he sees the old - timer from Sulphur Creek and admits ‘You were right, old Hoss; you were right’.
Resolution:
The dog sits for a while waiting for the man to set a fire. Yearning for the fire it started whining loudly and then trotted in the direction of the camp knowing it is the only way to survive.
Moral of the Story:
The moral lesson implicit in Jack London's short story “To Build a Fire” is a stern and cheerless one. It might be expressed as follows. Man is alone in a pitiless, godless universe. He cannot look to any supernatural power for any kind of assistance. The best thing that humans can do because of their mutual human predicament is to cooperate and work together to make existence as comfortable and secure as is possible. But in the long run we are all doomed to the same extinction that occurred to the unnamed protagonist of London's story.
Setting of the Story:
When the story opens, it is morning and the man and his dog are in the Yukon. The Yukon is the north - western part of Canada and lies in east of Alaska. London describes the sky as ‘cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey.’ The man thinks it must be fifty degree below zero. ‘Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below - how much colder he did not know.’
There are no clouds, but there is no sun. The landscape is cold and covered in snow and ice. The sky is gloomy. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark and that was due to the absence of sun. ‘Form the north to the south, all he can see is snow. There is only one strip of spruce trees that breaks up ubiquitous ice and snow. London makes it a point to describe how cold and unforgiving the landscape and weather are. He also stresses how the foolish man is initially not concerned about this. He is new to this area. This is what will lead to his downfall. He does not understand how dangerously cold it really is.
Appropriateness of the Title:
The significance of the title is simple. The story is about a man who embarks on a journey into the frozen wilderness. He is advised not to make this trip. He ventures to go anyway, seemingly unprepared. The simple act of building a fire would keep the man warm and alive. The title symbolises the simplicity of survival that the character is unable to achieve. Since the man cannot maintain a fire to keep himself alive, the author uses this title to represent the conflict in the story, man vs. nature. The man is revealed to be foolish and stubborn having brought very little in the way of supplies into the frozen wilderness.
Characterization:
There are four characters in the story; the man as the protagonist, the severe winter as the antagonist and the old - timer and the dog as the minor characters. First of all, the man is the one who drives the story along with his suffering in the snow. He is first described as a person who lacks of imagination and only trusts himself. With his behaviour, like making the dog walk in front of him in order to escape from danger, we can tell that he is a proud person who only trusts himself and thinks that he is superior to the dog. However, if he had trusted the dog's natural instinct and stayed at the house, he would not have died in the snow. The old - timer also has warned him about the harsh weather but the man does not pay any heed to his warning. The man can be seen as a dynamic character because he has changed into an exhausted and frustrated person before death, which is different from his initial attitude. The antagonist, which is the severe winter in Yukon, always blocks the man from what he is going to do. For example, when the man tries to build the fire, his fingers become numb and the snow falls from the branches and puts it (fire) out; when he finishes his lunch and starts his journey, he is trapped into the water and causes him to stay for a while in order to dry his footwears. The harsh weather is a factor that changes the man to a dynamic character. The man is also considered as a round character. He is the only character that the author spends the most time to describe. From the appearance to the habit, the author tries to represent the man as real as possible.
Narrative Technique:
The story uses the third - person point of view instead of the first - person point of view because the narrator does not use the pronoun ‘I’, therefore, it uses the third person point of view. The point of view in this story is not limited but omniscient for some reasons. The narrator seems to know everything in the story. Not only does the narrator know what is happening, but also what the characters are thinking about. ‘The dog knew that it was no time for travelling’ proves why the narrator is omniscient. ‘He paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch’ is another proof. The omniscience of the narrator can also be seen by how the narrator judges the man, making the readers feel that the narrator knows everything about the man before he dares to judge. The narrator in the story is heterodiegetic because the narrator is not involved in the story at all.
The Use of Foreshadowing:
The man's dog is one of the early foreshadows of the trouble that is to come. It is far too cold even for this breed used to the cold. It makes the dog depressed as ‘its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment’. Another example is when the man takes off his glove and is ‘astonished at the swift numbness that smote them’ (his fingers). The gravity of his situation is beginning to sing in. One of the most telling foreshadows is the revelation by the ‘old – timer’ about when it was unsafe to travel: ‘The old - timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below’. Even though the advice is sound and from expectance the man is smug and prideful, thinking he has outwitted nature and experience for a short time. When the man burns up all his matches at once, it is another foreshadow of his impending death. Rashness cannot win out over reason in the end.
The Use of Allusions:
An allusion is ‘a reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics, science or some other branch of culture’, such as mythology. In Jack London's naturalistic short story, ‘To Build a Fire’, there are at least two allusions:
1. In paragraph three, the main character, the ‘man’, is described as being a newcomer to the Yukon Territory, a ‘cheechako’ in Chinook jargon. The Chinooks are Native Americans from Pacific Northwest.
2. In paragraph thirty four, the man tries to run on his freezing feet and as he does so, he feels as though he ‘skim ( s ) along above the surface’, causing him to wonder if the sensation he feels is like that of the Roman deity, Mercury, of whom he had once seen a picture. When he acted as messenger of the gods and ran with winged feet and hat, Mercury became the patron god of many attributes, one of which, ironically, was luck.
The Use of Dramatic Irony:
Dramatic irony describes a situation in which the reader has information or knowledge that character in the story does not have. Dramatic irony can create suspense a feeling of anxiety or anticipation about what will happen next in a story. In ‘To Build a Fire’ is the ignorance of the human race with respect to nature. London's use of dramatic irony gives us an omniscient perspective on things, allowing us to take a step back and see not just the man's delusions with regards to his immediate surroundings, but also the lack of awareness and understanding we often show toward our own natural environment.
Right from the start we are painfully aware of the man's delusions. When the ‘old – timer’ warns him against travelling alone, the man scoffs at him for being ‘womanish’. Even without knowing what subsequently happens, we sense the danger. Scientific evidence is also blithely ignored by the man. He thinks that fifty degrees below zero is cold and comfortable, but that's all; he thinks he can get through it with thick socks, ear muffs and warm moccasins. Though the man chooses to remain ignorant, this is still an example of situational irony, as we know something he doesn't know or care to know.
Dramatic irony creates suspense in the story because we sense that something unpleasant is going to happen to the man, but we don't know quite what. May be he'll go through several terrifying ordeals before emerging victorious in the end - cold, frostbitten and hungry, but much wiser and crucially, still alive. Even if we don't know the ending, we know something the man doesn't the old timer was right all along. Unfortunately for the man, he only comes to realise, this when it's far too late.
Philosophy of Transcendentalism:
Transcendentalism had become a major philosophical field of thought during the 1830s, and despite no less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson himself claiming that it had died out by the 1840s. It remained a strong influence on both culture and literature. Jack London's writings show signs of transcendentalist influence and yet his works were set firmly in the realm of Realism, with little use for idealistic thought and behaviour. ‘To Build a Fire’ is especially significant in that it almost directly contradicts the ideas of man transcending animalistic instincts and growing to individual strength on the basis of intellectual and moral growth:
“...... (The cold) did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe....... 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.” (To Build a Fire)
The unnamed protagonist is entirely rooted in The Real; the concepts of Man vs. Nature never occur to him and he makes the mistake of thinking that Nature must be malicious in order to harm him. In fact, it is the coincidental and unthinking aspects of Nature that cause his death. Instead of striving to make himself stronger than his human self by learning about the cold and taking steps to neutralise it, he simply walks into the wild and dies of hypothermia. There is no communion with nature, no epiphany of harmony and the dog by his side does not even stay with him. In every sense the story is rooted in Realism rather than Transcendentalism and yet it works to reveal some of the essential flaws in that philosophy: man is not harmonious with Nature, but must be artificially protected from it and to assume a spiritual or providential ‘right’ to overcome Nature is to be willfully ignorant of natural dangers.
The Use of Symbols and Imagery:
The short story ‘To Build a Fire’ by Jack London also relies on some symbols through which the theme and author's message are suggested. Yukon trail and the less travelled one the man takes symbolise the idea of risky decisions and paths. Instead of staying on the Yukon trail and waiting for better weather, the man takes the risk. The hands of the man which are warm inside the mittens but gradually freeze and begin to numb when he takes them out are a symbol of life and death. As long as the hands are not frozen, the man is rather safe. The wolf dog / the husky is symbolical of nature's supremacy. Unlike the man, the dog is physically adapted to face the cold and his instinct of survival is better developed.
Imagery is any form of language that paints a picture by evoking as many of the five senses as possible. Of course, the visual sense is the one that most authors use but good examples of imagery will try and combine other senses to give a full, rounded description and therefore paint a vivid picture of what they are trying to represent. There are lots of examples in this short story. The following quotes should be considered:
“A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky .......”
This image is fascinating in the way it blurs the line between man and nature. The stars, objects of nature become personified, leap (ing) and dance (ing) like people. The sky, by contrast takes on the ‘cold’ indifference of nature.
“The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them and found them hanging on the ends of his arms.......”
In this terrifying image, the protagonist's dissociation from the natural world intensifies. The man is no longer disconnected from the world around him; he is beginning to lose his connection to his own body.
“With the sound of whiplashes in his voice ........”
London uses an interesting device here by comparing the man's voice to the sound of whiplashes. London leaves it to us to imagine the sound itself - perhaps a series of short cracks. Sound and image blend here and so we visualise whips beckoning the dog .
“an intangible pall .......”
London uses ‘pall’ in both senses of the word. On one level, we see the stark lightning that falls across the landscape. On another level, London evokes the image of a funeral pall, a piece of cloth lain upon a coffin, thus offering connotations and foreshadowings of death. There is also a subtle rhyme between the final syllable of ‘intangible’ and ‘pall’, with a consonance between b and p.
The Use of Figures of Speech:
Onomatopoeia:
Onomatopoeia is defined as a word which imitates the natural sounds of a thing. It creates a sound effect that mimics the things described, making the description more expressive and interesting. There are a few examples of onomatopoeia:
1. “There was a sharp explosive crackle that startled him!”
(In the example the word crackle is a noise and therefore makes it an example of Onomatopoeia).
2. “There was the fire snapping and crackling and promising life with every dancing hour.”
(The words such as snapping and crackling make the sentence onomatopoeia sentence because they are noises).
Personification:
Personification is the act of giving human characteristic or abilities to an object or animal. Some examples of personification are given below:
1. "Fire doesn't dance but people can."
2. “........ the animal slided mincing away ......”
(Humans slide mincing (if they choose to) and in the text it is given to an animal).
Simile:
Simile is a comparison of two objects using words ‘like’ and ‘as’. Some examples of simile are following:
1. “.......... the thick german socks were like sheaths of iron.......”
(The German socks are compared to sheaths of iron).
2. “The ice held his lips so tightly together that he could not empty the juice from his mouth. The result was a long piece of yellow ice hanging from his lips. If he fell down it would break, like glass, into many pieces.”
(This is a description of the ice that is forming on the man's face from the tobacco juice. The simile here emphasises the fragility of the ice; it would shatter just like glass shatters.)
3. “The man was shocked. It was like hearing his own Judgement of death. For a moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been.”
(This simile is foreshadowing the man's death as the fire goes out. It is one of the first times that the man understands the danger of his journey.)
Metaphor:
In this figure of speech, two things are compared without using the words like or as.
“Those old timers were rather womanish.”
Hyperbole:
In this figure of speech, deliberate and obvious exaggeration used for effect.
1. “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.”
2. “It had wet its forefeet and legs and almost immediately the water that clung to it turned to ice.”
Repetition:
There are several notable instances of repetition throughout ‘To Build a Fire’. The man is constantly thawing and refreezing various parts of his body, showing the futility of his efforts to remain warm. Three times he attempts to build a fire, each attempt more desperate and less successful than the last, emphasising the increasing mortal danger of his situation. The man's tobacco chewing, which he prioritizes over more important matters, occurs several times when the man is underestimating the environment's hazards. Finally, the man's notion of ‘cold’ is constantly being redefined - the longer he spends in the wilderness, the more frequently he has to reconsider his previous evaluation of the temperature.
Language:
The language used in the story ‘To Build a Fire’ by Jack London is rather complex because it abounds in descriptive passages, with elaborate sentences, often filled with figures of speech. The choice of words reflects the natural setting, as the semantic field is related to winter in nature. The story is also written in the narrative and discursive mode which means the narrator renders everything that happens. There is no dialogue except for a final quote, the man's last words before dying of hypothermia: “You were right, old hoss; you were right, the man mumbled to the old - timer of Sulphur Creek.” The rest of the narrative simply describes what is happening and includes the characters ' thoughts (the man's and those of the dog).
