To Build a Fire by Jack London

“To Build a Fire” is a story about one character, the man. This man throughout the story doesn’t say one word. He is pretty calm throughout the story. The main man or the only man for that matter seems to be a hard working man but is lacking in imagination. I believe this man has no imagination because he doesn’t think he needs one.

Jack London writes about a man around his fifties or sixties for this story. The only other “character” in this story is the dog that the man runs into. Like the man, the dog has no name. The nameless man seems to be a hard or a tough man that isn’t that well adapted to his surroundings. We can say that he might not have been around these kinds of situations before. For one instance he builds a fire under a tree laden with snow. When the fire gets bigger the heat rises up into the air and starts to melt the snow. The snow then falls down and puts the fire out. The man seems to have some kind of experience since he can survive for the time that he did.

The man in this story appears to not have too much common sense either. When he lit all of the matches at once, that showed us that he wasn’t thinking very clearly or even at all. He wasn’t thinking clearly probably because he was too busy thinking about his hands and feet getting frost bite or how everything else in his body was freezing. I do not think this man was prepared. If this man was prepared he would have things to prevent his frost bite, hunger, and his lack of shelter.

This man seems to think his abilities are pretty good since he thinks that he can survive through a winter in the wilderness but I think that throughout this story the man sees that he has no clue on what to do. When you go into the wilderness you need more supplies than he had and you shouldn’t be alone.

An example of the man not knowing what he should do is when he goes on the Yukon Trail by himself. Going alone on these escapades is very detrimental to your health. You can very possibly die. He’s obviously ignorant of this location. If the man was not ignorant of his location he wouldn’t be in this kind of situation.