Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: Narrating the Fight to Survive

Using the promotional flyer art for the 2015 film The Revenant, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s just an anchor point for not just visual reference for this written essay, which is being repackaged. This blog post has both nothing to do with and everything to do with what The Revenant represents in so many more ways. Not including The Revenant’s film title, but I just did. Joking aside, the film’s title really does not fit into this essay I wrote ages ago. I could be a prick and explain why. Lazily, by just copying and pasting various Dictionary definitions of what they have listed for the word “revenant,” but that will just spoil all the fun and ruin the mystery that this essay contains.

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” is the story of a man traveling alone in the Yukon on a deadly freezing day, with his only companion being a sled dog that is a husky. They travel in the Yukon towards his camp which is an all-day walk in this harsh weather, to reunite with his friends. In the story, the man is very inexperienced with the harsh arctic environment. Jack London narrates the story in third-person omniscient point of view for several reasons. First, the narration allows the reader to have greater knowledge of the character. The narrator quickly gives the reader important information about the man in the story, “He was a newcomer in the land, a Chechaquo, and this very his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.”(p.641) The quote illustrates how the omniscient point of view informs the reader of the man’s inexperience along with his naivety.

Jack London uses the third-person omniscient point of view to narrate the story in order for the reader to experience a sense of  “all knowing God” narrating the story. The narrator is in each character’s mind and knows what each character is thinking.  Jack London gives detailed description of the brutal climate of the Yukon’s harsh environment. The reader intuits the man is in danger, before the man realizes it himself. “Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than was a thought that never entered his head.”(p.642) With the third-person omniscient, the reader can see the details of the landscape that are important in sensing the conflict of man against nature.

“To Build a Fire” is simple story involving four characters: the man, the husky, the old timer at the camp,  and the natural environment of the Yukon. The effects of the point of view are of accessing all of the characters’ thoughts and emotions from the omniscient viewpoint. An example of this is the reader experiences the dog’s instincts of the freezing cold temperature. The dog knows it is too dangerous. Meanwhile, the man is arrogant and ignores important signs. Another important reason for the form of storytelling is the narrator keeps presenting important information as the man walks unknowingly toward his own death.

Without the omniscient point of view the story would very limited. Because of the omniscient point of view, the reader understands that the man is in danger because the old timer at the camp had given him advice. “The old timer had been serious about laying down the law that no one must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.” (p. 646) The old timer had warned the young man, but the man in  the story is so inexperienced and arrogant, that he ignores it. Since there is no one with the man to have a conversation with, the narrator must be able to move in and out of all the characters thoughts and feelings in order to move the story forward and create drama and conflict.

The omniscient point of view throughout the story increases the feel of dread and desperation as his adventure begins to go badly.  The man foot goes through the iced over body of water. At this point he knows he needs to start a fire for warmth. His foot is wet, and he knows he needs to build a fire. The man built the fire and his inexperience of that environment, caused the fire on top of the tree branches to melt and plung down him and put it out the fire. The man is more wet then ever. Now he has no fire, he is still wet and frost bite is beginning to set in. “The man was shocked. It was as though he heard his own sentence of death.”(p.647) The narrator is foreshadowing the man’s struggle with death, increasing the tension for the reader.

Another way the third-person omniscient point of view is used is to illustrate the difference between the man and the husky. The narrator acts as a voice that gives the insight between the husky’s reactions to the situation and the man’s in the story. The dog has ancestral knowledge instinct on how to survivor in the arctic. The man represents how humanity can only have knowledge through experience. Humans do not have ancestral knowledge like animals, e.g. the dog in the story. The man’s instinct in fact leads to his death. The husky’s ancestral knowledge allows the dog to survive in the arctic. Even when the man decided in a desperate fight against death, thinks of killing the husky for its body’s warmth. The dog senses danger, “Something was the matter, and it’s suspicious nature sense danger – it knew not what danger, but somewhere, somehow in its brain arose an apprehension of the man.”(p.649)

The quote presents the fact that the snow dog has a better survival instinct than the man. In this scene the omniscient narrator tells the story from the snow dog’s perspective. The point of view given by the narrator, jumps back and forth between the husky and the man,  and then full circle back to the narrator. The reason for the changes in perspective are to highlight the contrasts between man and animal. The fight for survival is clearly harder for man, than beasts in nature. The narrator reveals the slow death of the man in snow. The narration reveals how the man slowly dies from the cold, buiding to a clear message at the end. The fire represents human knowledge. The man’s own inability to know where to build a fire, causes the snow to melt, putting out the flame. This symbolizes that his life is also about to fade out, like the flame that is extinguished. In the end, the snow dog survives and heads back to the camp for long needed food and warmth from a fire. Nature will always be victor over man.

The story is powerful because Jack London had the idea to write the story from a perspective that presents as if it is a sentient force. The narrator seems to know everything of the environment, setting and characters, resulting in the reader experiencing nature as a supernatural force. 

Work Cited

London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 9^th Eds.  Robert S. Levine et al. Vol 2. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017 641- 652. Print.