To Build A Fire

In “ To Build A Fire” by Jack London, there is a strong theme of Man vs. Nature. The man in the poem has to endure the harsh cold of the Yukon to make it to a mining camp. Although the man is warned he continues anyway and underestimates the danger of the trip. He takes off his mittens and is shocked to find his fingers go numb so quickly. He then plunges through the ice and gets his feet wet. He builds a fire to warm himself, but when grabs the twigs the snow falls off the branches and puts out his fire. His hands become so frozen he can’t use them. In desperation he tries to kill his dog but without his hands there’s no way he can kill it. Without being able to build a fire, he ultimately freezes to death. In Human vs. Nature in this case, nature ended up winning.

From the beginning I had preconceptions that it would end badly. He went into the trip way to confident and had the attitude that he would be invincible. There were hints that my preconceptions were right while reading this. The fact that the dog’s intuition was different from the man’s intuition led me to believe that the dogs intuition would turn out be to right. Also the man’s carelessness and ignorance in the beginning foreshadowed his fate.

In the beginning it says, “He was surprised, however, at the cold”(p. 630). I don’t understand why he was so surprised at the cold. The region that he was in has a cold climate and he should have had the instinct to know what he was up against. The dogs instincts were better, “ It’s instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment”(p. 630). Every encounter he has with the harsh environment of nature becomes worse and worse throughout the reading. “What were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that was all; they were never serious (p.631). I think its very ironic how he tries to play off the serious of this. It is serious and becomes a bigger issue later in the reading and develops in much more than he intended. “He chuckled at his foolishness, and as he chuckled, he noted the numbness creeping into the exposed fingers” (p. 632). I think deep down he knew what he was doing was a little foolish but I think his pride and ignorance got in the way. He just laughed off his situation as if nothing was going to go wrong and everything would work out in the end.

I think humans are sometimes ignorant towards nature and we have too much pride. It says on page 632, “ Possibly all the generation of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew and it had inherited the knowledge”. I think humans have become distant from nature and we don’t appreciate it as much as we should and are not as one with it as other creatures such as dogs. We try to control and manipulate nature instead. The man in this story was ignoring nature and his pride got in the way. If we would have had some common sense in the beginning, his fate would have turned out much differently. I think that line foreshadows that the man’s fate is death and that the dog would ultimately survive.