Biography of Jack London (1876-1916)

 

To Build a Fire  Study Guide

 

Biography of Jack London (1876-1916)

Jack London

Jack London's naturalistic style sprang from a difficult and tumultuous childhood. His mother, Flora, suffered from typhoid fever as a child that left her nearly blind, hairless and small in stature. The brain damage caused by the fever lead to repeated bouts of depression and may have permanently unhinged her mind. When Flora was about twenty-five, she moved to San Francisco, suddenly a boom overflowing with rich gold prospectors and railroad magnates. Flora was just one of tens of thousands of immigrants following the money to San Francisco. At first, Flora gave piano lessons to support herself. In 1874 she moved in with a man named William Chaney, an astrologer who encouraged her fascination with spiritualism. Chaney would be remembered as an influential figure in the American Astrological movement. Together they ran an astrology parlor. Flora would receive money to communicate with the dead and send messages to the deceased loved ones of her customers. Unfortunately, it was not enough to pay the rent. Chaney, despite a day job as a magazine writer, was too obsessed with his experiments with the unknown to bring in a steady paycheck. Chaney was convinced that astrology was a science, and he thought that it could help man and woman produce a biologically superior child.

On January 12, 1876, Flora gave birth to a son; however, she was never sure that Chaney was the child's father. She named her son John, and she referred to him as her "badge of shame." John's birth had almost killed her, and she was unable to care for an infant. She sent him to a wet-nurse, an ex-slave named Virginia Prentiss, who took the place of his mother for the first eight months of his life. William Chaney deserted Flora. A few months after her son's birth, she met and quickly married John London, a widowed Civil War veteran with two young daughters. From this point on, her son John was called Jack to distinguish him from his step-father. Flora's restlessness, mood swings, hysterical breakdowns, and feigned heart attacks blighted the life of the entire family, but especially the life of her young son, to whom she never demonstrated affection. Eventually the Londons moved to Oakland, California. John London bought a ranch, and at age five Jack settled into the hard work of farming. He took a few swallows of ale while working, and became dreadfully ill. Two years later he was given wine at an Italian wedding, and he became delirious. His lifelong battle with alcohol had begun.

As Jack grew up, he became tough from fighting bullies, and despite a relatively small stature, he garnered a reputation for his cunning ability to brawl. At aged fourteen, Jack graduated from grammar school. Because his family could not afford to send him to high school, he went to work at a canning factory. Already Jack had developed a love for books, encouraged by a local librarian. These books opened up a world beyond Oakland. The more he canned pickles, the more he craved escape. Mostly this came in the form of alcohol. Jack would frequently get drunk in the local saloons after work. In these places he met men of the sea - sailors, sealers, whalers, harpooners. He took an opportunity to become an oyster-pirate, where he roamed the San Francisco Bay, stealing oysters from other people's farms. Having enjoyed himself immensely for three months, he returned to the San Francisco area when the job had ended, to work for the local fish patrol chasing poachers. When he got another chance to work on the open sea, London jumped at the opportunity.

When London returned to California, he tramped around the U.S. for almost a year before finding himself in his mother's kitchen, resolving to give up his vagrant ways and help support his family. His time away had made Jack newly determined to get an education, so at age nineteen, Jack decided to go back to high school. He now had to study as well as earn a living. He developed interests in political theory, especially socialism. Jack wanted to enter the revolutionary movement, but set his sights on finishing high school and attending college. His involvement in the Socialist Labor Party got him kicked out of school, so he studied on his own for entrance exams to the University of California at Berkeley. He was accepted, but he dropped out after six months, either because he was disappointed by the experience or because he needed to earn money for his family. He began to pursue writing in earnest, working at a laundry to support himself. When the Klondike gold rush hit, London borrowed money from his sister and struck out for gold and adventure. The experiences he had, the observations he made, would be crucial to some of his most successful writing. Returning to Oakland, Jack's big break finally arrived. "An Odyssey of the North," a short story, was published in 1900 and achieved critical success for its virility and vivid descriptions. That same year he met and married Bessie Maddern.

London subscribed to many popular beliefs of the nineteenth century. He believed so fervently in natural selection that he chose to marry based on social and genetic compatibility, rather than romantic love. While his career began to go extremely well - writing offers and money were pouring in - London's relationship with his wife almost immediately began to fall apart. Bessie gave London a daughter, Joan, with whom he would eventually have a close and happy relationship. But London began to spend less and less time with his family and more time with friends such as Anna Strunsky and George Sterling, who shared many of London's intellectual interests. London openly had affairs, and he traveled a great deal. In 1902, a second daughter was born, and Jack began to write The Call of the Wild. In 1903 The Call of the Wild was published and he separated from his wife.

During this period of his life, London began to expand his travels to other hemispheres. He also became interested in agriculture and farming and began to build a ranch in California. In 1904, London covered the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst Newspaper. He also published The Sea-Wolf, another of his most successful books. In 1905, he married his former secretary, Charmian Kittredge. In 1906, London begins building a sailing vessel he named the "Snark," and he publishes White Fang. Between 1907 and 1909, London and Charmian sailed around the world, and London wrote extensively about their time on the trip (The Cruise of the Snark) and about the Hawaiian Island, which he popularized as a vacation spot.

Throughout his adult life, London published prolifically: stories, essays, news articles and novels. He remained devoted to the idea of socialism, and twice ran for Mayor on a socialist platform. Both times he was soundly defeated. Though he was never able to overcome the racist views imbued to him in childhood, he advocated for other liberal causes, such as women's suffrage. While London was one of the highest paid and most successful writers of his time, he was terrible at managing money, and he was always short of cash. London died on November 21, 1916 of kidney failure, a result of his serious and lifelong problems with alcohol.

About To Build a Fire

"To Build a Fire" is a prime example of the literary movement of naturalism. Naturalism was an offshoot of Charles Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's theories on evolution. In his monumental 1859 work Origin of the Species, Darwin theorized that environments alter the biology and behavior of organisms; the organisms whose traits promote survival reproduce more successfully and adapt new, more efficient traits. Spencer applied Darwin's ideas to the human environment, and Social Darwinism became one of the dominant philosophies in the late 19th century.

Naturalists saw evolution as proof that the world is deterministic and that humans do not have free will. Since the evolutionary world is based on a series of links (each of which causes the next), any action humans make is not, as we might otherwise believe, a "first" step. Rather, the action has been caused by prior environmental, social, and biological factors beyond our individual control.

This deterministic view influenced the naturalists in a number of philosophical areas. Since humans do not have free will, the naturalists refrained from making moral judgments on the actions of their characters; after all, the environment, and not the human, has determined these actions. The naturalists also viewed the deterministic environment as indifferent and harsh to its inhabitants; accordingly, keen instinct rather than civilized intellect is necessary for survival (in "To Build a Fire," the man is lacking this instinct).

Naturalists also changed their subjects and language to reflect their ideas. The lower classes were more conducive to depicting the harsh, indifferent environment, and in "To Build a Fire," the lower-class man is trying to strike it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush. Moreover, since the naturalists believed that the deterministic world could be understood only through scientific facts, their prose style was usually more journalistic and spare.

London journeyed to the Yukon Territory in 1897 along with countless others hoping to make a score in the gold rush. In November 1897, he staked a claim in Henderson Creek, the destination of the man in "To Build a Fire." Though he left Alaska the following summer without much gold, he would draw from his rich experiences in the northern wilds for many of his lasting works, including Call of the Wild and White Fang and, of course, 1908's "To Build a Fire," usually considered his most lasting work.

Character List

The man: The man in "To Build a Fire" is purposely not given a name, as the deterministic environment is more important than his free will and individuality. His goal at the start of the story is to reach the camp to meet "the boys," presumably to prospect for gold. The man's greatest deficiency, leading to his death, is his inability to think about the future consequences of present actions or facts; at the beginning of the story, London describes how the extreme cold does not make the man meditate upon mortality. More pertinently, the man does not realize that building a fire under a spruce tree may be dangerous. In all his actions, the man exercises only intellectuality--he thinks about the temperature in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, for instance, a scientific indicator. He never uses instinct, which would inform him without thinking that certain actions are dangerous. The dog, conversely, instinctively understands the danger of the cold without knowing what a thermometer is. Ultimately, the man's lack of free will exonerates him from any deep responsibility for the accidents he has, which is why London writes that the second accident was his "own fault or, rather, his mistake." A "fault" implies full responsibility, whereas a "mistake" suggests an isolated incident out of one's control.

The dog: The dog represents pure instinct, a trait necessary for survival in the harsh Yukon. Unlike the man, who requires the products of intellectual civilization--warm clothing, matches, maps, thermometers--the dog simply uses its own natural advantages--fur, a keen sense of smell. Perhaps more importantly, the dog has an instinctive understanding of the cold. It knows that such conditions are dangerous and unsuitable for traveling; when its feet get wet, it instinctively bites at the ice that forms between its toes. This sense of instinct preserves the dog as opposed to the man--it even knows instinctively when the man is attempting to kill it (to warm his hands in its carcass). Although the dog cannot create a fire for itself, or even hunt down food in the wild so well, its instinct keeps it alive and allows it to find the nearby camp of men--"the other food-providers and fire-providers."

The old-timer: The man remembers the advice of an old-timer from Sulphur Creek who warned him against traveling alone in the Yukon when the temperature is lower than fifty degrees below. The man first scoffs at this advice when he adeptly handles his first accident, but later understands the wisdom in the old-timer's caution: man is not instinctively fit for the harsh, indifferent environment of the Yukon.

The boys: The man is trying to meet "the boys" by six o'clock at night. Presumably, they are prospecting for gold. Though they never appear in the story, the boys (and the man) are examples of the lower-class characters naturalism turned its attention to; only men without much to lose would risk their lives in the harsh Yukon.

 

 

 

Major Themes

Determinism: The movement of naturalism was greatly influenced by the 19th-century ideas of Social Darwinism, which was in turn influenced by Charles Darwin's theories on evolution. Social Darwinism applied to the human environment the evolutionary concept that natural environments alter an organism's biological makeup over time through natural selection. Social Darwinists and naturalists cited this as proof that organisms, including humans, do not have free will, but are shaped, or determined, by their environment and biology. Naturalists argued that the deterministic world is based on a series of links, each of which causes the next (for more on these causal links, see Causal links and processes, below). In "To Build a Fire," London repeatedly shows how the man does not have free will and how nature has already mapped out his fate. Indeed, both times the man has an accident, London states "it happened," as if "it" were an inevitability of nature and that the man had played no role in "it." The most important feature of this deterministic philosophy is in the amorality and lack of responsibility attached to an individual's actions (see Amorality and responsibility, below).

Amorality and responsibility:

A curious revision occurs when London writes that the man's second accident with the snow was his "own fault or, rather, his mistake." While both are damning words, "fault" is much more serious; it implies an underlying moral responsibility and role in future consequences, while "mistake" suggests an isolated incident outside of one's control. Likewise, the man believes his first accident is bad "luck," another word that connotes lack of free will. "Accident," too, insinuates an unforeseen or unanticipated event out of one's power.

If naturalism maintains that an individual has no free will (see Determinism, above), as London's careful phrasing suggests, then it is logical that the individual should not bear responsibility for his actions: if humans are not even in control of our own actions, why should we take responsibility for them?

The answer is that one should take responsibility for one's actions if one can anticipate potential consequences. Since the naturalistic world is based on causal links (see Causal links and processes, below), it should be possible, to an extent, to predict the consequences of our actions. The man could not have anticipated his falling through the snow, and therefore it is merely bad "luck." However, he should have anticipated that his other action--building a fire under a spruce tree--could carry potentially significant consequences: the snuffing out of the fire. Only in this anticipatory sense is he somewhat responsible. That London revises his judgment from "fault" to "mistake" suggests the gray area in the man's responsibility; while he should have anticipated the results of his actions, and thus be held liable, he did not, so he cannot be held liable.

Causal links and processes:

"To Build a Fire" is, among other things, a virtual instruction manual on how to build a fire. It details specifically how one goes about gathering twigs and grasses, assembling them, lighting them, and keeping the fire going. The story, like many naturalist works, is obsessed with processes. These processes can be viewed as causal links--each event causes the next one. Causality is another preoccupation of naturalism, which grounds itself in the philosophy of determinism (see Determinism, above).

While the man in the story is adept with physical processes, he cannot make associative mental leaps and project causal links in his mind. London tells us this from the start, describing how the extreme cold does not make him meditate in successively larger circles on man's mortality. He has also ignored advice about avoiding the cold, not thinking ahead to what might happen in such harsh conditions. This deficit hurts him most when he builds the fire under the spruce tree; he does not think ahead that he might capsize the tree's load of snow and snuff out the fire. Only by the end of the story, when he is near death, does he mentally process causal links, thinking about his own death and how others might come across his body. The ability to process these mental causal links is the only way one can be held responsible for his actions in naturalism (see Amorality and responsibility, above). Since the man does not make these mental links, he is not fully responsible for the accidents that befall him.

Instinct over intellectualism: Though the man is hardly an "intellectual," he exercises intellectual properties more than instinctive ones. He uses complicated tools (matches) to build a fire; he understand how cold it is through temperature readings; he identifies where he is (Henderson Creek, the Yukon) through language on a map. The dog, on the other hand, is pure instinct. It remains warm through its fur coat or by burrowing into the snow; it has an innate understanding of the cold and its dangers; it could not point out its location on a map, but it knows by scent where to find the nearby camp with men. In the Yukon, instinct is far superior to intellect. The man's intellect backfires on him. His ability to light the matches with his numb fingers suffers in the extreme cold, and both his fingers and the matches are examples of man's naturally selected advantage of intellect: man has fingers to operate tools, and his larger, more complex brain allows him to create such tools. The dog is much wiser, aware that the cold is too dangerous for them; it even knows when the man is trying to deceive it somehow (he wants to kill it and bury his hands in its warm carcass). Accordingly, only the dog survives, and though it may not be able to take care of itself fully, it instinctively knows to go to "the other food-providers and fire-providers" in the nearby camp.

Indifferent environment and survival: Naturalism not only maintains that the environment is deterministic (see Determinism, above), but indifferent. The environment does nothing to help its inhabitants; in fact, it is coldly indifferent to their existence and struggle. In "To Build a Fire," the Yukon would be bitterly cold without the man, as well, and it does not cease when the man struggles to stay alive. This indifference makes survival itself a critical goal for naturalist characters. As the story goes on, the man changes his goal from reaching the camp, to warding off frostbite, to merely staying alive. Naturalism thus elicits profound conflicts, man versus nature being one of them.

The objective power of numbers and facts: Naturalism maintains that the world can be understood only through scientific, objective knowledge. In "To Build a Fire," the reader receives a number of these hard facts. For instance, temperatures lower than negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit demarcate the danger zone of traveling alone. London tells us the exact amount of matches the man lights at once (seventy). Moreover, the man is preoccupied with the distance to the camp and the time he will reach it. These hard facts should arm the man with enough information to assess competently the deterministic environment (see Determinism, above), but he fails to do so before he is in mortal danger.

Naturalistic subject matter and language: Naturalist fiction writers devised new techniques and subject matters to convey their ideas. Generally, they focused more on narrative rather than character. "To Build a Fire" has a nearly nonstop narrative drive, and we only occasionally enter into the mind of the man--who does not even have a name in the story, indicating how little London is concerned with him as a unique person. Naturalists often used sparer, harder language to complement their plot-driven stories; this tendency can be seen as a verbal corollary to naturalism's preoccupation with objectivity (see The objective power of numbers and facts, above). Finally, naturalism usually turned its attention to the often-ignored lower classes. The man in the story is a lower- to middle-class drifter trying to strike it rich; no one with any wealth would risk his life in such brutal conditions.

Short Summary

A man travels in the Yukon (in Alaska) on an extremely cold morning with a husky wolf-dog. The cold does not faze the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, who plans to meet his friends by six o'clock at an old claim. As it grows colder, he realizes his unprotected cheekbones will freeze, but he does not pay it much attention. He walks along a creek trail, mindful of the dangerous, concealed springs; even getting wet feet on such a cold day is extremely dangerous. He stops for lunch and builds a fire.

The man continues on and, in a seemingly safe spot, falls through the snow and wets himself up to his shins. He curses his luck; starting a fire and drying his foot-gear will delay him at least an hour. His feet and fingers are numb, but he starts the fire. He remembers the old-timer from Sulphur Creek who had warned him that no man should travel in the Klondike alone when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero.

The man unties his icy moccasins, but before he can cut the frozen strings on them, clumps of snow from the spruce tree above fall down and snuff out the fire. Though building a fire in the open would have been wiser, it had been easier for the man to take twigs from the spruce tree and drop them directly below on to the fire. Each time he pulled a twig, he had slightly agitated the tree until, at this point, a bough high up had capsized its load of snow. It capsized lower boughs in turn until a small avalanche had blotted out the fire.

The man is scared, and sets himself to building a new fire, aware that he is already going to lose a few toes from frostbite. He gathers twigs and grasses. His fingers numb and nearly lifeless, he unsuccessfully attempts to light a match. He grabs all his matches--seventy--and lights them simultaneously, then sets fire to a piece of bark. He starts the fire, but in trying to protect it from pieces of moss, it soon goes out.

The man decides to kill the dog and puts his hands inside its warm body to restore his circulation. He calls out to the dog, but something fearful and strange in his voice frightens the dog. The dog finally comes forward and the man grabs it in his arms. But he cannot kill the dog, since he is unable to pull out his knife or even throttle the animal. He lets it go.

The man realizes that frostbite is now a less worrisome prospect than death. He panics and runs along the creek trail, trying to restore circulation, the dog at his heels. But his endurance gives out, and finally he falls and cannot rise. He fights against the thought of his body freezing, but it is too powerful a vision, and he runs again. He falls again, and makes one last panicked run and falls once more. He decides he should meet death in a more dignified manner. He imagines his friends finding his body tomorrow.

The man falls off into a comfortable sleep. The dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow like that without making a fire. As the night comes, it comes closer and detects death in the man's scent. It runs away in the direction of the camp, "where were the other food-providers and fire-providers."

First Part Summary:

A man turns off from the main trail in the Yukon (in Alaska) on an extremely cold, gray morning. He surveys the icy, snowy tundra. The cold does not faze the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, since he rarely translates hard facts, such as the extreme cold, into more significant ideas, such as man's frailty and mortality. He spits, and his saliva freezes in mid-air, an indication that is colder than fifty degrees below zero. He shrugs it off; he is going to meet "the boys" by six o'clock at the old claim near Henderson Fork. He has taken an alternate route to examine the possibility of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He feels his lunch of biscuits inside his jacket, warming against his skin.

The man walks through the thick snow, his unprotected cheekbones and nose feeling numb. A husky wolf-dog follows him, instinctively depressed by and apprehensive of the cold. Every warm breath the man exhales increases the ice deposit on his beard. He passes over more terrain to the frozen bed of a stream, ten miles from his destination, where he plans to eat lunch. The faintness of the last sled-trail in the snow indicates no one has been by in a month, but the man pays it no mind; still, he occasionally thinks that it is very cold, and automatically and unsuccessfully rubs his cheekbones and nose to warm them. He realizes his cheeks will "frost," and wishes he had prepared for this, but decides that frosted cheeks are only painful and not very serious.

Though the man does not spend much time thinking, he is observant of the curves and the possibility of dangerous springs in the creek as he wends along it. If he crashed through one, he could potentially get wet up to his waist, and even wet feet on such a cold day would be extremely dangerous. As he continues, he avoids several springs. At one point, suspecting a spring, he pushes the reluctant dog forward to investigate. The dog's feet get wet, and it instinctively licks and bites at the ice that forms between its toes. The man helps the dog, briefly removing his mitten in the numbing cold.

A little after noon, the man takes out his lunch. His frozen beard prevents his biting into it, and his fingers and toes are numb, so he decides to build a fire. He thinks about the man from Sulphur Creek who gave him advice about the cold; he scoffed at it at the time. He takes out matches, gathers twigs, and starts a fire. He thaws his face and eats his biscuits. The dog warms itself near the fire. After, the man continues up a fork of the creek. The dog wants to remain with the fire or at least burrow in the snow, but since there is no "keen intimacy" between the two, the dog does not try to warn the man for his own sake; it is concerned only with its own well-being. Still, it follows the man.

Analysis

"To Build a Fire" is the quintessential naturalist short story. Naturalism was a movement in literature developed largely by Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London in the late 19th-century. Its major themes (which will all be explained and explored in greater depth here) are determinism over free will; the indifference of the environment; survival; absence of moral judgment; instinct over intellectualism; a fascination with processes; the emphasis of narrative over character; depiction of characters in the lower classes; and more realistic language befitting such characters and settings.

"To Build a Fire" reveals much about itself and its naturalist origins in its title. "To Build a Fire" sounds almost like an instruction manual, and the story does, indeed, teach the reader how to perform various acts, such as building fires, avoiding dangerous springs, and navigating a creek. As in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (not considered a naturalist novel, but it shares many of the same concerns), where the reader learns all about whale hunting, the reader leaves the story with a sense of the processes at work in its world. We see other processes in effect, too, such as the layers of snow and ice that have built up in the Yukon, or the ice that accumulates on the man's beard.

The title also implies the need for survival. London might have (unwisely) given his story the unpleasant title "To Survive, You Need To Build a Fire." Naturalism is interested in the deep conflicts that bring out the brute instincts of man. London's story provides one of the oldest conflicts in literature and life: man versus nature. The man is at constant risk of freezing in the brutal cold, and soon mere survival, rather than the prospect of finding gold, will become his preoccupation.

The man is clearly not an experienced Yukon adventurer. He ignores all the facts that indicate danger--he underestimates the cold, he ignores the absence of travelers in the last month, he de-emphasizes his soon-to-be-frostbitten cheekbones. Again, processes are important: he does not make any mental processes, taking facts and assigning them increasing significance. While this may seem at first like an intellectual deficit, what the man truly lacks is instinct--the unconscious understanding of what the various facts mean.

The dog, on the other hand, is pure instinct. While it cannot intellectualize the cold as the man can, assigning numerical values to the temperature, it has "inheritedŠknowledge" about the cold. Without thinking, the dog knows the cold is dangerous, knows the spring is risky, knows to bite at the ice that forms between its toes, and even knows not to get too close to the fire for fear of singeing itself.

While the main conflict is man versus nature, it would be inaccurate to say that nature actively assaults the man. Nature does not go out of its way to hurt the man; it would be just as cold without the man's presence, as well. Rather, the environment is indifferent to the man, as it frequently is in naturalist literature. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way, and it will not notice if he perishes. In the same way, the dog does not care about the man, only about itself.

Even London does not seem to care about the man too much--or, more precisely, he does not make any overt moral judgments about the man. He merely conveys the objective facts, pessimistic though they may be about the man. For instance, in describing the man's inability to make mental leaps, London only states "That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head." London never denounces outright the man's foolhardiness; his most aggressive comment, "The trouble with him was that he was without imagination," is only a suggestion that the man will encounter trouble because of this deficit.

Likewise, London maintains an air of neutrality with his prose, objective and reportorial. He focuses mostly on the narrative and little on the man's interior world and history--indeed, we never even know the man's (or the dog's) name. He is less an individual and more a representative of all humanity, especially humanity up against nature. Also in keeping with the naturalist tradition, the man is obviously not a member of the upper class. Like "the boys," he hopes to strike it rich by prospecting for gold, as did many during the Yukon Gold Rush in the late 19th-century, or even by selling logs.

One major point of naturalism not discussed yet is determinism. It will become more important in the next part of the story.

Summary and Analysis of Part II

Second Part Summary:

In a seemingly safe, solid spot, the man falls through the snow and wets himself up to his shins. He curses his luck; starting a fire and drying his foot-gear will delay him at least an hour. He gathers brush and builds a fire, aware that his numb feet must not remain wet. His exposed fingers (necessary to make the fire) are also numb, and having stopped walking, his heart no longer pumps warming blood as much throughout his body. But the fire builds up, and the man feels safe. He remembers the old-timer from Sulphur Creek who had warned him that no man should travel in the Klondike alone when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero. He thinks the old-timers are "womanish," and that even with his "accident," he had saved himself in solitude. Nevertheless, it is extremely cold, and his fingers are almost completely numb.

The man unties his icy moccasins, but before he can cut the frozen strings on them, clumps of snow from the spruce tree above fall down and snuff out the fire. Though building a fire in the open would have been wiser, it had been easier for the man to take twigs from the spruce tree and drop them directly below on to the fire. Each time he pulled a twig, he had slightly agitated the tree until, at this point, a bough high up had capsized its load of snow. It capsized lower boughs in turn until a small avalanche had blotted out the fire.

Analysis

Naturalism maintains that individuals do not have free will, but that their environment shapes their behavior. The naturalistic world is based on a series of links, each of which causes the next (these causal links can be viewed as processes). Humans are never the first causal link; our actions are caused and determined by social, environmental, and biological factors. This philosophy, called determinism, is crucial in explaining why the naturalistic world is amoral. (Note: amorality is not the same as immorality. Immorality signifies a "bad" morality, while amorality means an absence of morality.) We see this amorality at play when the man falls through the snow: he curses his "luck." "Luck" suggests an action out of an individual's control; it is "luck" whether one wins the lottery or not. There is no moral judgment on his action; falling through the snow seems simply like bad luck, since the "unbroken snow seemed to advertise its solidity beneath." The man himself uses the word "accident" to describe the event. An accident also suggests something out of one's control, an unforeseen or unanticipated event.

For both problems that develop with the snow, London simply states "it happened." This phrasing implies passivity, even paralysis, on the part of the man, to whom "it" has "happened." He has not created the unlucky events--"it"--and therefore cannot take responsibility. Nature has indifferently and deterministically created these new conditions for the man. Indifferent, again, because it does not care if the man is there or not. Deterministic, because it seems fated and the man could not have avoided it.

Or could he have? Of the second accident, London ambiguously writes that it was the man's "own fault or, rather, his mistake." Why does London revise his definition? A "fault" implies free will and a role in the consequences that develop. The word "mistake," however, is much like "accident"; it is a less moral term that implies an isolated incident out of one's control. (A person usually makes a single "mistake" in an entire process, whereas if the person is at "fault," the responsibility of the entire process seems to rest on him.) Still, "mistake" suggests some individual responsibility or lack thereof, at least more than "luck" does. How, then, does individual responsibility exist in naturalism, which denies the existence of individual will? Put simply, if humans are not even in control of our own actions, why should we take responsibility for them?

Naturalism maintains that one should take responsibility insofar as one can anticipate potential consequences. Since the naturalistic world is based on causal links, it should be possible, to an extent, to predict the consequences of our actions. The man could not have anticipated his falling through the snow, and therefore it is merely bad luck. However, he should have anticipated that his other action--building a fire under a spruce tree--could carry potentially significant consequences--the snuffing out of the fire. Only in this anticipatory sense is he somewhat responsible.

Why should the man have anticipated danger? Other than ignoring the old-timer's advice and foolishly and lazily building the fire under the spruce tree, the man has proven himself incapable of making the associative mental projections that reveal causal links. London told us this much in the first half of the story; the man refused to meditate upon the cold and expand his thinking to more universal ideas about mortality. Moreover, the man frequently works with processes (again, processes are the causal links in the naturalistic world), such as building fires. But he pays attention to these processes only when they somehow benefit him, as with the fire. When the process is potentially harmful, he ignores it; London even refers to the causal agitation of the boughs of the spruce tree as a "process."

The man's unwillingness to think more deeply about processes saddles him with some of the responsibility for the fire's going out. However, we can also argue that the man seems not only unwilling, but also incapable, of thinking about these processes. Therefore, he never could have anticipated the fire's going out, and he cannot be held responsible. That London calls the second event the man's "fault," then his "mistake," suggests a blend of the two arguments: the man should have anticipated many of the dangers in the Yukon, but nature ultimately determines his behavior.

Summary and Analysis of Part III

Third Part Summary:

The man is scared, and thinks the old-timer was right: a trail-mate would be useful now in building a new fire. He sets himself to building it, aware that he is already going to lose a few toes from frostbite. With increasingly numb fingers, he grabs undesirable small twigs as the dog watches him.

The man reaches for a piece of birch-bark in his pocket, but his numb fingers cannot feel it. He fights off the thought that his feet are freezing, and beats his hands against his body to restore circulation. The dog watches him, and the man is envious of the dog's natural warmth. The man gets some sensation in his fingers, removes his mitten, and takes out a bunch of matches. But his fingers grow numb again and he drops the matches in the snow. His fingers are lifeless and cannot pick up the matches. Without the sense of touch, he uses vision alone to guide his fingers, and he "will[s]" them to close in on the matches.

He eventually bites a match and lights it on his leg. But the smoke goes into his nostrils and lungs, he coughs, and he drops it into the snow. He grabs the whole bunch of matches--seventy in total--and lights them on his leg, all at once. He holds them to the bark but soon becomes aware that his flesh is burning. Unable to bear it, he lets go, and the matches fall and go out into the snow. The bark is on fire, though, and he adds grass and twigs to it. In guarding the fire against pieces of moss from the grass, he scatters the twigs, and the fire goes out.

The man looks at the dog, and remembers hearing about a man who, caught in a blizzard, killed a steer and crawled inside its warm carcass. The man decides to kill the dog and puts his hands inside its warm body. He calls out to the dog, but something fearful and strange in his voice frightens the dog. The man crawls toward the dog, which moves aside. The man regains his composure and calls normally to the dog. When it comes forward, the man flails out at it, but his frozen, numb fingers cannot move. Still, he grabs the snarling dog in his arms. The man realizes he cannot kill the dog, since he is unable to pull out his knife or even throttle the animal. He lets it go, and it moves away from him. The man tries to restore circulation in his hands, but they are lifeless.

The man realizes that frostbite is now a less worrisome prospect than death. He panics and runs fearfully along the creek trail, the dog at his heels. Perhaps the running will restore his circulation. Even if he loses some fingers and toes, he might at least near his destination, where the boys could tend to him. He keeps blocking out the thought that he will soon die. He feels like his frozen feet are skimming across the surface. But his endurance gives out, and finally he falls and cannot rise. He decides to rest, then later walk. He feels warm within, although he has no sensation. He fights against the thought of his body freezing, but it is too powerful a vision, and he runs again.

He falls again, and the dog sits nearby and watches him, which angers the man. The man makes one last panicked run and falls once more. He decides he has been acting foolishly, and it would be better to meet death in a more dignified manner. He imagines himself with the boys tomorrow and coming across his own body. He imagines telling the old-timer that he was right.

The man falls off into a comfortable sleep. The dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow like that without making a fire. At night, it comes closer and detects death in the man's scent. It backs away, and later runs away in the direction of the camp, "where were the other food-providers and fire-providers."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysis

Survival becomes the primary motivation for the man as he defends himself against nature. His increasingly desperate attempts to restore warmth to his freezing body contrast with the indifference of the Yukon. The environment merely remains the same--brutally cold--and does not care at all about the man's survival.

What is also significant within the environment is the importance of numbers. We already know that the temperature plays a crucial role, and that fifty degrees below zero demarcates the danger zone. The reader learns a new number here: seventy, the number of matches the man has. London could have simply kept stating that the man has a "bunch" of matches, but he tells us the exact number when they light. Time also plays a key role for the man, as does distance to the camp. Naturalism maintains that the world is knowable only through objective science. Hard facts, like degrees of Fahrenheit or the number of matches, make this particular world knowable.

The man finally takes these facts and makes conjectures about the future, unlike before where he refuses to think about processes. While he initially fights off ideas of his dying, he later engages in causal thinking, entertaining visions of his body freezing and even of finding his own body the next day, a truly abstract, futuristic mode of thought. But by now it is too late--projections of causal links will do little for him at this point.

His projections are pointless because whatever free will naturalism had afforded the man before (none, technically, but he could at least make decisions) has completely vanished by this section of the story. Hands are man's naturally selected advantage, and allow us to use tools, themselves the products of man's intellect. But here the man's hands betray him. He cannot operate the matches properly, nor can he use his knife, so both tools go to waste. In nature, his intellect turns out to be useless.

Instead, the dog's instinct prevails. It not only instinctively recognizes that the man is trying to deceive it some way, but its own naturally selected advantages--its fur coat, especially--keep it safe and warm. While the dog may not have the intellectual capacity to create fire and food for itself, it instinctively knows where the providers of these necessities are. In an indifferent, brutal environment, London maintains, this is a far more valuable resource than intellectuality.

Summary and Analysis of Part I

First Part Summary:

A man turns off from the main trail in the Yukon (in Alaska) on an extremely cold, gray morning. He surveys the icy, snowy tundra. The cold does not faze the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, since he rarely translates hard facts, such as the extreme cold, into more significant ideas, such as man's frailty and mortality. He spits, and his saliva freezes in mid-air, an indication that is colder than fifty degrees below zero. He shrugs it off; he is going to meet "the boys" by six o'clock at the old claim near Henderson Fork. He has taken an alternate route to examine the possibility of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He feels his lunch of biscuits inside his jacket, warming against his skin.

The man walks through the thick snow, his unprotected cheekbones and nose feeling numb. A husky wolf-dog follows him, instinctively depressed by and apprehensive of the cold. Every warm breath the man exhales increases the ice deposit on his beard. He passes over more terrain to the frozen bed of a stream, ten miles from his destination, where he plans to eat lunch. The faintness of the last sled-trail in the snow indicates no one has been by in a month, but the man pays it no mind; still, he occasionally thinks that it is very cold, and automatically and unsuccessfully rubs his cheekbones and nose to warm them. He realizes his cheeks will "frost," and wishes he had prepared for this, but decides that frosted cheeks are only painful and not very serious.

Though the man does not spend much time thinking, he is observant of the curves and the possibility of dangerous springs in the creek as he wends along it. If he crashed through one, he could potentially get wet up to his waist, and even wet feet on such a cold day would be extremely dangerous. As he continues, he avoids several springs. At one point, suspecting a spring, he pushes the reluctant dog forward to investigate. The dog's feet get wet, and it instinctively licks and bites at the ice that forms between its toes. The man helps the dog, briefly removing his mitten in the numbing cold.

A little after noon, the man takes out his lunch. His frozen beard prevents his biting into it, and his fingers and toes are numb, so he decides to build a fire. He thinks about the man from Sulphur Creek who gave him advice about the cold; he scoffed at it at the time. He takes out matches, gathers twigs, and starts a fire. He thaws his face and eats his biscuits. The dog warms itself near the fire. After, the man continues up a fork of the creek. The dog wants to remain with the fire or at least burrow in the snow, but since there is no "keen intimacy" between the two, the dog does not try to warn the man for his own sake; it is concerned only with its own well-being. Still, it follows the man.

Analysis

"To Build a Fire" is the quintessential naturalist short story. Naturalism was a movement in literature developed largely by Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London in the late 19th-century. Its major themes (which will all be explained and explored in greater depth here) are determinism over free will; the indifference of the environment; survival; absence of moral judgment; instinct over intellectualism; a fascination with processes; the emphasis of narrative over character; depiction of characters in the lower classes; and more realistic language befitting such characters and settings.

"To Build a Fire" reveals much about itself and its naturalist origins in its title. "To Build a Fire" sounds almost like an instruction manual, and the story does, indeed, teach the reader how to perform various acts, such as building fires, avoiding dangerous springs, and navigating a creek. As in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (not considered a naturalist novel, but it shares many of the same concerns), where the reader learns all about whale hunting, the reader leaves the story with a sense of the processes at work in its world. We see other processes in effect, too, such as the layers of snow and ice that have built up in the Yukon, or the ice that accumulates on the man's beard.

The title also implies the need for survival. London might have (unwisely) given his story the unpleasant title "To Survive, You Need To Build a Fire." Naturalism is interested in the deep conflicts that bring out the brute instincts of man. London's story provides one of the oldest conflicts in literature and life: man versus nature. The man is at constant risk of freezing in the brutal cold, and soon mere survival, rather than the prospect of finding gold, will become his preoccupation.

The man is clearly not an experienced Yukon adventurer. He ignores all the facts that indicate danger--he underestimates the cold, he ignores the absence of travelers in the last month, he de-emphasizes his soon-to-be-frostbitten cheekbones. Again, processes are important: he does not make any mental processes, taking facts and assigning them increasing significance. While this may seem at first like an intellectual deficit, what the man truly lacks is instinct--the unconscious understanding of what the various facts mean.

The dog, on the other hand, is pure instinct. While it cannot intellectualize the cold as the man can, assigning numerical values to the temperature, it has "inheritedŠknowledge" about the cold. Without thinking, the dog knows the cold is dangerous, knows the spring is risky, knows to bite at the ice that forms between its toes, and even knows not to get too close to the fire for fear of singeing itself.

While the main conflict is man versus nature, it would be inaccurate to say that nature actively assaults the man. Nature does not go out of its way to hurt the man; it would be just as cold without the man's presence, as well. Rather, the environment is indifferent to the man, as it frequently is in naturalist literature. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way, and it will not notice if he perishes. In the same way, the dog does not care about the man, only about itself.

Even London does not seem to care about the man too much--or, more precisely, he does not make any overt moral judgments about the man. He merely conveys the objective facts, pessimistic though they may be about the man. For instance, in describing the man's inability to make mental leaps, London only states "That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head." London never denounces outright the man's foolhardiness; his most aggressive comment, "The trouble with him was that he was without imagination," is only a suggestion that the man will encounter trouble because of this deficit.

Likewise, London maintains an air of neutrality with his prose, objective and reportorial. He focuses mostly on the narrative and little on the man's interior world and history--indeed, we never even know the man's (or the dog's) name. He is less an individual and more a representative of all humanity, especially humanity up against nature. Also in keeping with the naturalist tradition, the man is obviously not a member of the upper class. Like "the boys," he hopes to strike it rich by prospecting for gold, as did many during the Yukon Gold Rush in the late 19th-century, or even by selling logs.

One major point of naturalism not discussed yet is determinism. It will become more important in the next part of the story.

Summary and Analysis of Part II

Second Part Summary:

In a seemingly safe, solid spot, the man falls through the snow and wets himself up to his shins. He curses his luck; starting a fire and drying his foot-gear will delay him at least an hour. He gathers brush and builds a fire, aware that his numb feet must not remain wet. His exposed fingers (necessary to make the fire) are also numb, and having stopped walking, his heart no longer pumps warming blood as much throughout his body. But the fire builds up, and the man feels safe. He remembers the old-timer from Sulphur Creek who had warned him that no man should travel in the Klondike alone when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero. He thinks the old-timers are "womanish," and that even with his "accident," he had saved himself in solitude. Nevertheless, it is extremely cold, and his fingers are almost completely numb.

The man unties his icy moccasins, but before he can cut the frozen strings on them, clumps of snow from the spruce tree above fall down and snuff out the fire. Though building a fire in the open would have been wiser, it had been easier for the man to take twigs from the spruce tree and drop them directly below on to the fire. Each time he pulled a twig, he had slightly agitated the tree until, at this point, a bough high up had capsized its load of snow. It capsized lower boughs in turn until a small avalanche had blotted out the fire.

 

 

 

 

Analysis

Naturalism maintains that individuals do not have free will, but that their environment shapes their behavior. The naturalistic world is based on a series of links, each of which causes the next (these causal links can be viewed as processes). Humans are never the first causal link; our actions are caused and determined by social, environmental, and biological factors. This philosophy, called determinism, is crucial in explaining why the naturalistic world is amoral. (Note: amorality is not the same as immorality. Immorality signifies a "bad" morality, while amorality means an absence of morality.) We see this amorality at play when the man falls through the snow: he curses his "luck." "Luck" suggests an action out of an individual's control; it is "luck" whether one wins the lottery or not. There is no moral judgment on his action; falling through the snow seems simply like bad luck, since the "unbroken snow seemed to advertise its solidity beneath." The man himself uses the word "accident" to describe the event. An accident also suggests something out of one's control, an unforeseen or unanticipated event.

For both problems that develop with the snow, London simply states "it happened." This phrasing implies passivity, even paralysis, on the part of the man, to whom "it" has "happened." He has not created the unlucky events--"it"--and therefore cannot take responsibility. Nature has indifferently and deterministically created these new conditions for the man. Indifferent, again, because it does not care if the man is there or not. Deterministic, because it seems fated and the man could not have avoided it.

Or could he have? Of the second accident, London ambiguously writes that it was the man's "own fault or, rather, his mistake." Why does London revise his definition? A "fault" implies free will and a role in the consequences that develop. The word "mistake," however, is much like "accident"; it is a less moral term that implies an isolated incident out of one's control. (A person usually makes a single "mistake" in an entire process, whereas if the person is at "fault," the responsibility of the entire process seems to rest on him.) Still, "mistake" suggests some individual responsibility or lack thereof, at least more than "luck" does. How, then, does individual responsibility exist in naturalism, which denies the existence of individual will? Put simply, if humans are not even in control of our own actions, why should we take responsibility for them?

Naturalism maintains that one should take responsibility insofar as one can anticipate potential consequences. Since the naturalistic world is based on causal links, it should be possible, to an extent, to predict the consequences of our actions. The man could not have anticipated his falling through the snow, and therefore it is merely bad luck. However, he should have anticipated that his other action--building a fire under a spruce tree--could carry potentially significant consequences--the snuffing out of the fire. Only in this anticipatory sense is he somewhat responsible.

Why should the man have anticipated danger? Other than ignoring the old-timer's advice and foolishly and lazily building the fire under the spruce tree, the man has proven himself incapable of making the associative mental projections that reveal causal links. London told us this much in the first half of the story; the man refused to meditate upon the cold and expand his thinking to more universal ideas about mortality. Moreover, the man frequently works with processes (again, processes are the causal links in the naturalistic world), such as building fires. But he pays attention to these processes only when they somehow benefit him, as with the fire. When the process is potentially harmful, he ignores it; London even refers to the causal agitation of the boughs of the spruce tree as a "process."

The man's unwillingness to think more deeply about processes saddles him with some of the responsibility for the fire's going out. However, we can also argue that the man seems not only unwilling, but also incapable, of thinking about these processes. Therefore, he never could have anticipated the fire's going out, and he cannot be held responsible. That London calls the second event the man's "fault," then his "mistake," suggests a blend of the two arguments: the man should have anticipated many of the dangers in the Yukon, but nature ultimately determines his behavior.

Summary and Analysis of Part III

Third Part Summary:

The man is scared, and thinks the old-timer was right: a trail-mate would be useful now in building a new fire. He sets himself to building it, aware that he is already going to lose a few toes from frostbite. With increasingly numb fingers, he grabs undesirable small twigs as the dog watches him.

The man reaches for a piece of birch-bark in his pocket, but his numb fingers cannot feel it. He fights off the thought that his feet are freezing, and beats his hands against his body to restore circulation. The dog watches him, and the man is envious of the dog's natural warmth. The man gets some sensation in his fingers, removes his mitten, and takes out a bunch of matches. But his fingers grow numb again and he drops the matches in the snow. His fingers are lifeless and cannot pick up the matches. Without the sense of touch, he uses vision alone to guide his fingers, and he "will[s]" them to close in on the matches.

He eventually bites a match and lights it on his leg. But the smoke goes into his nostrils and lungs, he coughs, and he drops it into the snow. He grabs the whole bunch of matches--seventy in total--and lights them on his leg, all at once. He holds them to the bark but soon becomes aware that his flesh is burning. Unable to bear it, he lets go, and the matches fall and go out into the snow. The bark is on fire, though, and he adds grass and twigs to it. In guarding the fire against pieces of moss from the grass, he scatters the twigs, and the fire goes out.

The man looks at the dog, and remembers hearing about a man who, caught in a blizzard, killed a steer and crawled inside its warm carcass. The man decides to kill the dog and puts his hands inside its warm body. He calls out to the dog, but something fearful and strange in his voice frightens the dog. The man crawls toward the dog, which moves aside. The man regains his composure and calls normally to the dog. When it comes forward, the man flails out at it, but his frozen, numb fingers cannot move. Still, he grabs the snarling dog in his arms. The man realizes he cannot kill the dog, since he is unable to pull out his knife or even throttle the animal. He lets it go, and it moves away from him. The man tries to restore circulation in his hands, but they are lifeless.

The man realizes that frostbite is now a less worrisome prospect than death. He panics and runs fearfully along the creek trail, the dog at his heels. Perhaps the running will restore his circulation. Even if he loses some fingers and toes, he might at least near his destination, where the boys could tend to him. He keeps blocking out the thought that he will soon die. He feels like his frozen feet are skimming across the surface. But his endurance gives out, and finally he falls and cannot rise. He decides to rest, then later walk. He feels warm within, although he has no sensation. He fights against the thought of his body freezing, but it is too powerful a vision, and he runs again.

He falls again, and the dog sits nearby and watches him, which angers the man. The man makes one last panicked run and falls once more. He decides he has been acting foolishly, and it would be better to meet death in a more dignified manner. He imagines himself with the boys tomorrow and coming across his own body. He imagines telling the old-timer that he was right.

The man falls off into a comfortable sleep. The dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow like that without making a fire. At night, it comes closer and detects death in the man's scent. It backs away, and later runs away in the direction of the camp, "where were the other food-providers and fire-providers."

Analysis

Survival becomes the primary motivation for the man as he defends himself against nature. His increasingly desperate attempts to restore warmth to his freezing body contrast with the indifference of the Yukon. The environment merely remains the same--brutally cold--and does not care at all about the man's survival.

What is also significant within the environment is the importance of numbers. We already know that the temperature plays a crucial role, and that fifty degrees below zero demarcates the danger zone. The reader learns a new number here: seventy, the number of matches the man has. London could have simply kept stating that the man has a "bunch" of matches, but he tells us the exact number when they light. Time also plays a key role for the man, as does distance to the camp. Naturalism maintains that the world is knowable only through objective science. Hard facts, like degrees of Fahrenheit or the number of matches, make this particular world knowable.

The man finally takes these facts and makes conjectures about the future, unlike before where he refuses to think about processes. While he initially fights off ideas of his dying, he later engages in causal thinking, entertaining visions of his body freezing and even of finding his own body the next day, a truly abstract, futuristic mode of thought. But by now it is too late--projections of causal links will do little for him at this point.

His projections are pointless because whatever free will naturalism had afforded the man before (none, technically, but he could at least make decisions) has completely vanished by this section of the story. Hands are man's naturally selected advantage, and allow us to use tools, themselves the products of man's intellect. But here the man's hands betray him. He cannot operate the matches properly, nor can he use his knife, so both tools go to waste. In nature, his intellect turns out to be useless.

Instead, the dog's instinct prevails. It not only instinctively recognizes that the man is trying to deceive it some way, but its own naturally selected advantages--its fur coat, especially--keep it safe and warm. While the dog may not have the intellectual capacity to create fire and food for itself, it instinctively knows where the providers of these necessities are. In an indifferent, brutal environment, London maintains, this is a far more valuable resource than intellectuality.

 

2004 Frank Paya

BYU (Provo) Utah

Course: American Literarure