To Build A Fire Setting Analysis

Nature often tests a man’s limits. Sometimes man can overcome these tests and hardships and win; however, these are times just simply fails. In Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” a man goes through many trials and is tested to make it to survival in which tests his limits. Unfortunately, through arrogance and lack of preparation, the man struggles and becomes frustrated and in battle within himself. Nature has no limits to test man in his task to make it to safety. In the short story “To Build a Fire,” the man is in constant battle with himself and the frosty nature of the Klondike and the challenges that it endures. The setting in “To Build a Fire” has an impact on the character, plot and symbolism.
One of the first ways the setting has an impact …show more content…
In the exposition, the man is surprisingly cocky and is full of arrogance and some ignorance in himself and his ability to make it on his own in fifty degrees below zero like weather, and that alone creates suspense within the story knowing the man might not make it. In the rising action, per London, “…certainly when cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numbed nose and cheek-bones…” (2). The setting in this part of the exposition emphasizes the suspense between the man and the cold weather because the man wants to get up the mountain to join the boys at the safety point in the story but the weather creates a challenge that the man must face. In the rising action, the man is continuing his hike up the mountain and he had been traveling on the frozen creek bed and had broken through the ice and had been soaked from the waist down and instant fear because this kind of soaked could mean life or death the longer he stayed wet. “…to get his feet wet in such a temperature meant trouble and danger…” (3). In the climax the man creates a fire to dry off after his incident with falling in the creek bed and he began to think cocky again and nature punished him by dropping snow on his fire and putting it out. The man began to stare at the fire in shock but quickly the cockiness vanished and turned into straight up fear and instant panic that he wouldn’t make it to the boys. “The man it’s when shocked. It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death…sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been…” (6). In the falling action, the man begins to panic and is questioning his survival and has went from a complete optimist to reality smacking him in the face making him a pessimist. The man struggles to build another fire and is literally picking out matches with his mouth trying to light them orally and he ends up dropping them into the snow and still can’t feel his body and had thought about taking