To Build a Fire by Jack London
By: July • Essay • 406 Words • November 15, 2009 • 1,471 Views
Essay title: 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