To Build a Fire
The Theme in Jack London's "To Build a Fire"In the story "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, there is one principal theme; respecting nature and having a powerful understanding of the warning signs it gives a person. This theme is shown through the character and his actions. The main character in the story had an attitude that prevented him from heeding internal and external warnings that Mother Nature had been sending him from the beginning. He did not respect nature's power, and most definitely paid the ultimate price for it.His attitude was arrogant and careless. The man had no real experience in the harsh realms of the deadly cold Yukon. He only understood facts and never had had any "hands on" encounters with what "being cold" really meant. He knew it was very cold and his body was numb, but he failed to realize the danger that this posed to his extremities. He was just a newcomer with no experience, who thought that what he had heard from the old man in Sulphur Creek was just an exaggeration of the truth. But there were plenty of warning signs that what he was about to encounter was very perilous to the human body, yet neither the "absence of sun from the sky," (101) nor "the tremendous cold"
" This should have been a sure sign to him that he was in serious trouble. If he had paid adequate attention to all of these external signals, he may have survived. He should have sent many warning signals to the man. The man encountered many external warnings that told him it was too cold to be travelling in Mother Nature's furry as well. In the main character's case, it led to his cold death. If he had only had a trail mate he would be in no danger now. His fingers "seemed remote from his body" because he could not move them. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. London describes him by saying:The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. There were the most obvious clues that the man should have recognized and acted on. The temperature was far less than fifty degrees below, but he did not care about how much colder it was. " (106) This is when he realizes that he did not know nearly as much as he thought he did about the wilderness and all of its harshness. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain. It was not because he was long used to it. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained.
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Acceptance Essays
