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In the story “To Build A Fire,” Jack London presents a bitter conflict between man and nature in the harsh Yukon Trail environment. The author’s choice to use nature as the antagonist portrays an understanding of a force working against the main character, the man, as he struggles to endure in the cold. By giving nature several aspects of human features, London personifies the environment by creating different things that went wrong, which could have been avoided. London foreshadows the man’s fate throughout the story by making him recall what should have happened. The human-nature relationship portrayed by London shows that due to man’s selfishness, he is unable to survive the cold.
Throughout the tale London explores a heartbreaking relationship between man and nature. He shows how the main character is entirely encircled by threatening signs, and through his instincts, the right thing to do is to turn back. However, due to the man’s stubbornness, he considers the old-timers’ advice “that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below as rather womanish,” having saved himself after an accident (London and Anette, 264). The man’s stubbornness makes him think that “all he had to do was keep his head, and he was all right” (London and Anette, 264). With pride, he fails to notice the rapidity with which the cold was numbing his hands, feet, and face while his body was chilling through his skin due to blood loss.
While outside the village, the man acknowledges the coldness of the temperature, colder than below fifty, from a sanctuary of the bleakness of the open-air world. The personified nature relentlessly subjects the man to constant challenges that make it hard for him to reach his safety. The antagonist is shown as if to exact revenge against the protagonist due to his arrogance. The man believes in his ability to prevail against nature’s forces, and with a vengeance, nature seems to counter every move he makes to safeguard himself against the cold. That is why “each time he pulled a twig he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree” when he built a fire beneath the spruce tree (London and Anette, 265). Nature’s wrath against man leads to the blotting out of the fire, and “where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and disordered snow” (London and Anette, 265). With the fire out, the man realizes the aggravated threat and tremendous power that he faces, which makes him distressed when he realized that he had not control.
The lack of relationship with the dog is another cause of the man’s death. How they related was entirely established on toil-slave nature, and “the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash” (London and Anette, 262). The dog only considered keeping the company of the man since he could provide food and fire to keep it warm. As the man “was losing his battle with the frost. It was creeping into his body from all sides,” the dog could not help but see the man face his death (London and Anette, 272). The dog’s inability to warm that man against what he does wrong is due to the feeling the man has never treated him well.
Everything that could potentially go wrong went wrong in the story. London shows that nature was acting in a manner that reassured the reader that it was after the man. The selfish nature of the man makes him incapable of help even when he can read from the dog what to do. Moreover, the arrogance seen in the man contributes to his death as he finds himself incapable of fighting against nature’s forces.
Work Cited
London Jack and Anette P Kane. To Build a Fire and Other Stories. English Language Programs Division United States Information Agency 1991.
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