Naturalism In Jack London's 'To Build A Fire'
Chad Mead
April 5, 2013
ENGL-227 World Fiction Discuss Naturalism and the Importance of the Dog to Understand the Theme.
The author of this short story is none other than Jack London. One of the most influential novelists of his age, Jack London was the author who wrote “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”. Both books were excellent and even share some similarities with the story, “To Build a Fire”, which is the story we are going to discuss. “To Build a Fire” is a story of a man fighting the harsh weather of the Yukon with only his dog, where he is ultimately defeated by it. This story has a strong Naturalistic presence in it, and shows it primarily through the means of the man’s dog. Through this style of writing, we begin to understand that this story is about survival in the wilderness using one’s instinct rather than sheer will.
Naturalism is a type of writing style that is direct, no sugarcoated words, and shows us the harsh realities of daily life. Jack London used naturalism, the most …show more content…
When the man finished eating and smoking his pipe, he started along the trail back to his camp again, with the dog, leaving the fire behind. As soon as this happens the dog is mentioned in a long dialogue about how it yearns to return towards the fire, and how the man did not know what real cold was. The line that really identifies with naturalism was that, “The dog knew cold; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (658). Through the dog’s environment and instinct, it knew what to do to survive a climate that it had known its entire life, and then some. The man, however, was described as the polar opposite of the dog, as “the man who did not know cold and possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold” (658). This distinction between the two is now very evident, which brings up the turning point in the
April 5, 2013
ENGL-227 World Fiction Discuss Naturalism and the Importance of the Dog to Understand the Theme.
The author of this short story is none other than Jack London. One of the most influential novelists of his age, Jack London was the author who wrote “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”. Both books were excellent and even share some similarities with the story, “To Build a Fire”, which is the story we are going to discuss. “To Build a Fire” is a story of a man fighting the harsh weather of the Yukon with only his dog, where he is ultimately defeated by it. This story has a strong Naturalistic presence in it, and shows it primarily through the means of the man’s dog. Through this style of writing, we begin to understand that this story is about survival in the wilderness using one’s instinct rather than sheer will.
Naturalism is a type of writing style that is direct, no sugarcoated words, and shows us the harsh realities of daily life. Jack London used naturalism, the most …show more content…
When the man finished eating and smoking his pipe, he started along the trail back to his camp again, with the dog, leaving the fire behind. As soon as this happens the dog is mentioned in a long dialogue about how it yearns to return towards the fire, and how the man did not know what real cold was. The line that really identifies with naturalism was that, “The dog knew cold; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (658). Through the dog’s environment and instinct, it knew what to do to survive a climate that it had known its entire life, and then some. The man, however, was described as the polar opposite of the dog, as “the man who did not know cold and possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold” (658). This distinction between the two is now very evident, which brings up the turning point in the