Acts of Defeat
             "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, is a short story about a man who is traveling to find his friends in the Yukon Territory during the bitter winter weather. While warned against traveling alone in the freezing cold, he heads out to meet his friends at a distant camp, with only his dog, the clothes on his back, and one meal. The man is foolish and does not think that the cold will defeat him, but it does. The cold slowly eats away at him, beginning with his fingers and finally taking his life. The man has several instances of bad "luck," such as falling into a puddle of water up to his knees, the spruce tree dumping snow into his fire, and the matches falling through his numb hands and onto the snow. The man's end is marked by his hubris and the ill-fated circumstances he encounters in the merciless Yukon Territory. The central idea is to think before you act and not to make impulse decisions. The man in the story is an individual who thinks only of his actions and not the consequences, which consequently lead to his death.
             The death of the main character happens because his conflicts triumph over him. While the main conflict of "To Build a Fire" is man versus nature, it would not be correct to say that nature aggressively attacks the man. Nature doesn't go out of its way to wound the man; it would be just as cold without the man present. Rather, the environment is unsympathetic to the man. The author writes, "High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow. This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them...It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out." The nature around the man doesn't help him out by making the snow not collapse on the fire, it just does what is natural to its being. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way either, and it will not notice if the man dies...