Opinion essay about the story ‘To build a fire’ by Jack London. ‘To build a fire’ is a psychological story generally about the struggle of a man with himself and with the nature of Yukon. And it has forced me to think about my attitude to life. But now I’d like to reflect on how might the story have been different if the man had treated his dog like a pet! “To build a fire” is a marvelous short story set in the Yukon. The opening setting is the early morning and the middle of winter somewhere in the Yukon.
The man is on his way to the camp and the only companionship he got is his dog – “a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf”. We might think that if the man had travelled with the dog, nothing dangerous or tragic would have happened. But this is an intrigue of the story. From the very beginning the chechaquo started making mistakes. As the man was a newcomer in the land and this was his first winter, he wasn’t prepared to travel in the wilderness by himself.
The man was arrogant about nature and had no fear of the cold. That was his main mistake. He made everything that the man could do, to kill himself. His careless behaviour to the dog forced it to keep away from his owner. The dog could be the support and the helper for the man. It had inherited the knowledge of cold. “And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearthful cold”. But the man paid no attention to the dog. He only forced it to go forward and spoke to her with the sound of whip-lashes. But why did he behave like that?
The Report on Southern Literature in Sweat, a Good Man and Story of an Hour
Southern Literature is considered a sub-genre in American literature because of its way of incorporating recurring themes such as dialect, importance of family, town history, rural setting and many more. The stories “A Good Man” by Flannery O’Conner, “Sweat” by Zora Neal Hurston and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin are all written in this southern style and contain similar elements such as ...
Maybe because he was self-confident or because “he was quick and alert in the things of life but not in the significances”. In general, it doesn’t matter why. At the end of the story we see that old-timer on Sulfur Creek was alive because he was experienced and benefitted from others’ experiences, that it was not wise to travel alone in the Yukon, the boys at camp were also alive because they were together, the husky was alive because it was well-suited for the Yukon extreme climate. And chechaquo didn’t survive. But everything might have been different if the man had been more far-seeing and at first had treated his dog like a pet.
Huskies are the most devoted dogs and if the man had warned himself dog’s confidence, it would have never left his owner, even when he died. When the chechaquo couldn’t build a fire and was completely freezing, the dog could have curled up around the man and warmed him with his natural covering, thick fur and boiling blood. So the man could have been saved and after all he would have been at the camp with the boys. All in all, the end of the story might have been different, but one thing is certain, if the man and his dog had been friends, the end of the story would have been not tragic.
