The Yukon Trail

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…

move under his feet. He had also heard the snow-covered-ice skin breaking”. “The sun was absent from the sky” this quote tells us that the sun was not shining that day which proves to be very troublesome. In the frigid lands of Canada’s Yukon Territory the temperatures can get very low, even into the negatives, and this alone is a challenge to face. The sun being gone only makes this worse. Already our protagonist is off to a bad start as he is left to make his way in the below…

In To Build a Fire by Jack London, London was trying to portray a conflict between youth and arrogance as opposed to wisdom and experience. The main character is a young man who believes that he knows the frozen wilderness, but he is still a newcomer who has not yet learned to respect the power of nature. London shows early in the story that the young man lacks imagination, an asset he sorely needs when tested to the extreme by the harsh wilderness. The man’s egotism and greed are in conflict…

Creative Writing 2.4 World War I has hit. It has now been two years; this unsettled conflict was only supposed to last 100 days. Shells and gunfire are not all that we are afraid of, for winter is coming. His hands tremble as the icy wind bites at his bare fingertips. Night watch must have started as he leaves his frozen post with the sun setting at his back. The frosted mud cracks underfoot as he returns to a temporary home in the safety of the concrete hard trenches. Indents of the standard…

A fierce green fire coming from a wolf’s eyes. When I first read this piece by Aldo Leopold, I interpreted the “fierce green fire” as something that the wolf felt. I saw this fire as pain and anger. To me, the pain and anger was so strong, that it was felt and seen as a “fierce green fire.” However, when analyzing further into the reading, I understood the “fierce green fire” as a will to live. The situation that the wolf was in was one of stress, danger, anger and probably confusion. I think…

In the versions of, “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, the text is a more realistic representation of the man’s struggle for survival. When the man is drowsing off into a death of freezing, the narrator describes what the man is feeling in that moment. “Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known” (London, page 12). In the text the reader can better understand this moment of death then in the film because in the story he does die…

threatening jungle. Jack London based his writing on the 1896 Yukon Gold Rush, which was a mass migration to Canada and Alaska. The main character in the story is described as a “newcomer” and is in search of his friends in a mining camp, which alludes to the fact that this man is a migrant on his way to mine for gold. In Connell’s narrative, it was written in 1924 around the time of the…

In the article, “To Build A Fire”, Jack London how some people can make the worst mistakes because they do not want to pay attention instead they would rather keep talking so they will not want to miss anything. For example in this story the man wanted to keep walking to go to the camp, instead of resting, it is cold outside and there is snow on the ground and the legs of both the man and the dogs legs could freeze. The dog decided to let the man know that is time to stop and take a break. The…

London’s novella Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck’s transformation from a domesticated pet on a vast Santa Clara Valley estate to the primal killer he becomes in the bitter regions of the Klondike wilderness. London delivers Buck’s journey in a plot consisting of only three simple, but major, events and uses settings and narration to tell the story in a way that allows a reader to easily become invested in Buck’s character from the viewpoint of a loyal and lovable pet, as well as, that…

The Naturalist work, “To Build a Fire” by Jack London excels in the Naturalist idea of determinism. This means that what could happen, most likely will happen. Through the character’s treacherous journey in the snow and frigid temperatures we can see two pieces of masculinity exemplified by our author, the fighter’s mentality, and man’s stubbornness. The main character’s masculine fighter’s mentality demonstrates his will to never give up, and shows men’s perseverance through a Naturalistic view…