Naturalism In To Build A Fire

As a whole, the new literary movement known as naturalism, darker form of realism, developed in the 19th century. Naturalism writers try to describe life in control our life such as the environment or nature by describing real settings and using ordinary people as characters. The most common theme that the authors explore was the conflict between human and nature. The character will face odd conditions or chances. Moreover, unlike realism, other movements that occurred at the same time, naturalism often illustrates the dark side which brings social costs of life such as objective and violence topic instead of details about daily life. To represent the theme, naturalism usually focuses on man’s ability to conquer environment, human existence …show more content…
To begin with, Jack London, the author of ‘To Build a Fire’, is the one of the most popular writers of this period. Nowadays, ‘To Build a Fire’ is a representative story which shows naturalism well. In this story, the author shows the conflict between the man and the wolf dog, the main characters, and nature, they surviving in the extreme cold they are not able to measure. However, there is more important topic which is more suitable to naturalism, conflict between instinct and knowledge. Instinct is one of the most suitable examples of naturalism. People or animals are not able to control their innate characteristics. When they face a problem, they do something which they want whatever it is or is not reasonable enough. To be specific, at the jungle, humans should kill some animals or make a fire for survive even though they already know that it will bring negative consequences. In order to illustrate this conflict and naturalism, the writer use symbolism. The wolf dog indicates a connection to instinct. In this story, we can easily find the conflict between the man and the wolf dog as …show more content…
For this story, the author thinks that unwillingness is the only obstacle between poor men and success. At the beginning of the story, the main character Jurgis is a hard worker and man even though the working and sleeping conditions are unstable. However, workers never concern about quitting factory because when one quits, then the factory hires other immigrant who do not want any prices. As it can be understood from this story, although workers enough recognize the poor conditions of working and do hard working, they are not able to avoid the reality, which people still eat not well made food, sleep in killed beds, or work at poor factories. And this situation exemplifies the naturalism. In line 37, the author uses the word “De-vyled ham” as a reality that people cannot be unclean their