London’s use of setting in “To Build a Fire”
             In “To Build a Fire,” Jack London uses many details of setting to illustrate the gravity of the protagonist’s situation. The story is a detailed description of the dangers of intense cold and the stages involved in the process of freezing to death. The man in “to build a fire” is a very dogmatic and arrogant person who believed in his own abilities and took everything at face value. He didn’t analyze and scrutinize over every detail. He definitely wasn’t one to philosophize and his conceptions were rooted in the tangible not the surreal. At the end, though, he realizes his own deficiencies and finally dies. The magnitude of the man’s situation is fully illustrated and established through London’s descriptions of the landscape, snow, ice, and intense cold.
             The height of London’s graphic portrayal is the story’s explicit description of the intense cold of the arctic winter that the man is travelling through. The “sharp, explosive crackle”(pg. 119 para. 2) that occurred in the air before the man’s spit could even hit the snow is just an example of the vicious cold that the man was travelling through. The frozen moisture of the man’s breathing that forms ice on his beard and mustache. The “crystal beard of the color and solidity of amber”(pg. 120 para. 1) that transpires when the man chews tobacco and the speed in which the man’s appendages become numb and unusable are further examples of London’s account of the cold.
             The journey through the unbroken white “north and south, as far as the eye could see” (paragraph 2) was another striking account of the wonderful use of setting in this story. Without a doubt, the concept of a world of ice is a major factor in the greatness of this story undermined only by London’s graphic depicti
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