An Analysis Of To Build A Fire, By Jack London

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Traveling through the frosty Yukon with dogs and sleds, or just yourself in below seventy-five degree weather sounds pretty similar, right? Yes, it does however, they can also be complete opposites. The Call of the Wild by Jack London is about a dog and his journies through the Yukon during the gold rush as a sled dog. The main character, Buck, faces many struggles and difficulties along with many victories and successes. To Build a Fire, also written by Jack London is about a man who is brand new to the Yukon, who is traveling by himself with a wild dog at his heels. Both stories contain how each character was new to the Yukon and their struggle to survive in the harsh conditions, along with the difference of how the dogs were treated and …show more content…
They were new-comers to the land and had never experienced anything like it before. The quote from the Call of the Wild, “The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow,” describes how Buck was witnessing snow for the first time. Buck came from California, where he lived a very happy and content life. When he was taken to the Yukon, he had no survival skills in which he had to develop to make it through his journey. Buck is alike the man in To Build a Fire, who also had never been in the north described in the quote, “He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter.” The man was unfamiliar with the land and the harsh conditions. He had to learn his way around and use his prior knowledge of survival skills to help him make it through his journey. Buck and the man were brand new to the treacherous Yukon which was a main reason for their struggle to …show more content…
Being a dog, Buck was treated terribly; constantly being beaten, uncared for, and worked. “He had never been struck by a club in his life, and did not understand,” this quote describes how Buck had never experienced being abused and how he didn’t understand why someone would do something like that. He was neglected in many ways, one being he was underfed and unkempt. In To Build a Fire, the man never owned any dogs or used them to travel. But, along his journey he encountered a wild dog that decided to reside with him. Even when the man thought about killing the dog to save himself he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not once did he hurt the dog or neglect it, he even fed the dog some of his lunch. “At the man’s heels trotted a dog, big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother; the wild wolf.” The man didn’t even own the dog but still cared for it anyways. The dogs in each story live in completely different ways, and the way they were treated affects the plot of the

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