Blog 16

“To Build a Fire” is a short story by Jack London about a man traveling through the Yukon Peninsula in freezing weather. Throughout the story, the man faces death multiple times. He seems like he does not think that he will die on his journey because he does not really pack a lot of supplies. The only thing extra thing that the man actually brought was his lunch. The man is traveling through the Yukon all alone except for his husky dog who travels with him. He has to be very careful while he is traveling because in some areas, there are places of very thin ice with water under it. He has to be careful because if he breaks the ice and falls through and gets wet, then he will probably get frost bite. In one area, the man did not want to walk over some ice because he was not sure if it was thick enough for him to walk over, so he pushed his dog forward to test it out. His dog reluctantly walks over the ice and it breaks. His paws got wet, but he did not get frost bite because he kept biting off the ice that was forming between his toes. In the end of the story, the man ends up dying in the middle of the night. The dog was not very attached to the man so he just leaves him when he knows that he is dead. I thought that this story was kind of messed up. The man should have prepared more for his journey. If I was going to go on this journey, I definitely would have packed more than just my lunch to bring with me. I also thought it was messed up how many times the man tried to sacrifice his dog in order to keep himself alive. He tried to push him in the cold water so he did not have to risk it.

This story had a lot of nature in it. It reminded me of Thoreau and Emerson because both of them wrote about nature a lot probably because they lived in nature when they left society. I think that the subject of nature is what made these authors similar.

Bibliography

London, Jack. "To Build a Fire, by Jack London." The World of Jack London 2012®. Web. 08 Mar. 2012.