Examples Of Naturalism In To Build A Fire

A novelist and journalist Jack London who wrote a story “To Build a Fire.” It started a man is traveling the North American wilderness, in temperatures of seventy degrees below zero, with only his wolf-dog for a companion. When he crosses a frozen stream, a misstep puts his foot through the ice. He noticed he must find a way to build a fire to protect himself. The reader and the protagonist wonder if a particular environment directly affects human fate. However, the man eventually died in the frozen forest. It was the climax of the story that the snow sank on the fire he built; the death of the man is the end of the conflict. This story depicts the external confrontation between the man and nature through his attitude change to extreme circumstances. The story of “To Build a Fire” reveals the naturalist attitude that the fate of an individual is determined by the environment. Thus, the external conflict with …show more content…
First of all, in the “To Build a Fire,” the narrator illustrated extreme environmental portrayals, “It was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below than seventy below” (851). One of the basic ideas of naturalism is to insist on a way of thinking that humans have to yield to nature, so the above quotation emphasizes that humans feel awe and anxiety about nature through environments where people cannot live. Secondly, the man did not worry much about the crises surrounding him. The man was without imagination and only understood the facts. He was a newcomer without much experience and thought that he could conquer mother nature. The narrator said, "the temperature was seventy-five below zero, which didn't mean anything to him except a number," the man did not think of his, "frailty as a creature of temperature" (851). This mention means that he has a firm attitude to the environment and that his destiny has already been determined as