First Part Summary:

A man turns off from the main trail in the Yukon (in Alaska) on an extremely cold, gray morning. He surveys the icy, snowy tundra. The cold does not faze the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, since he rarely translates hard facts, such as the extreme cold, into more significant ideas, such as man's frailty and mortality. He spits, and his saliva freezes in mid-air, an indication that is colder than fifty degrees below zero. He shrugs it off; he is going to meet "the boys" by six o'clock at the old claim near Henderson Fork. He has taken an alternate route to examine the possibility of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He feels his lunch of biscuits inside his jacket, warming against his skin.

The man walks through the thick snow, his unprotected cheekbones and nose feeling numb. A husky wolf-dog follows him, instinctively depressed by and apprehensive of the cold. Every warm breath the man exhales increases the ice deposit on his beard. He passes over more terrain to the frozen bed of a stream, ten miles from his destination, where he plans to eat lunch. The faintness of the last sled-trail in the snow indicates no one has been by in a month, but the man pays it no mind; still, he occasionally thinks that it is very cold, and automatically and unsuccessfully rubs his cheekbones and nose to warm them. He realizes his cheeks will "frost," and wishes he had prepared for this, but decides that frosted cheeks are only painful and not very serious.

Though the man does not spend much time thinking, he is observant of the curves and the possibility of dangerous springs in the creek as he wends along it. If he crashed through one, he could potentially get wet up to his waist, and even wet feet on such a cold day would be extremely dangerous. As he continues, he avoids several springs. At one point, suspecting a spring, he pushes the reluctant dog forward to investigate. The dog's feet get wet, and it instinctively licks and bites at the ice that forms between its toes. The man helps the dog, briefly removing his mitten in the numbing cold.

A little after noon, the man takes out his lunch. His frozen beard prevents his biting into it, and his fingers and toes are numb, so he decides to build a fire. He thinks about the man from Sulphur Creek who gave him advice about the cold; he scoffed at it at the time. He takes out matches, gathers twigs, and starts a fire. He thaws his face and eats his biscuits. The dog warms itself near the fire. After, the man continues up a fork of the creek. The dog wants to remain with the fire or at least burrow in the snow, but since there is no "keen intimacy" between the two, the dog does not try to warn the man for his own sake; it is concerned only with its own well-being. Still, it follows the man.

Analysis

"To Build a Fire" is the quintessential naturalist short story. Naturalism was a movement in literature developed largely by Emile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London in the late 19th-century. Its major themes (which will all be explained and explored in greater depth here) are determinism over free will; the indifference of the environment; survival; absence of moral judgment; instinct over intellectualism; a fascination with processes; the emphasis of narrative over character; depiction of characters in the lower classes; and more realistic language befitting such characters and settings.

"To Build a Fire" reveals much about itself and its naturalist origins in its title. "To Build a Fire" sounds almost like an instruction manual, and the story does, indeed, teach the reader how to perform various acts, such as building fires, avoiding dangerous springs, and navigating a creek. As in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (not considered a naturalist novel, but it shares many of the same concerns), where the reader learns all about whale hunting, the reader leaves the story with a sense of the processes at work in its world. We see other processes in effect, too, such as the layers of snow and ice that have built up in the Yukon, or the ice that accumulates on the man's beard.

The title also implies the need for survival. London might have (unwisely) given his story the unpleasant title "To Survive, You Need To Build a Fire." Naturalism is interested in the deep conflicts that bring out the brute instincts of man. London's story provides one of the oldest conflicts in literature and life: man versus nature. The man is at constant risk of freezing in the brutal cold, and soon mere survival, rather than the prospect of finding gold, will become his preoccupation.

The man is clearly not an experienced Yukon adventurer. He ignores all the facts that indicate danger--he underestimates the cold, he ignores the absence of travelers in the last month, he de-emphasizes his soon-to-be-frostbitten cheekbones. Again, processes are important: he does not make any mental processes, taking facts and assigning them increasing significance. While this may seem at first like an intellectual deficit, what the man truly lacks is instinct--the unconscious understanding of what the various facts mean.

The dog, on the other hand, is pure instinct. While it cannot intellectualize the cold as the man can, assigning numerical values to the temperature, it has "inheritedŠknowledge" about the cold. Without thinking, the dog knows the cold is dangerous, knows the spring is risky, knows to bite at the ice that forms between its toes, and even knows not to get too close to the fire for fear of singeing itself.

While the main conflict is man versus nature, it would be inaccurate to say that nature actively assaults the man. Nature does not go out of its way to hurt the man; it would be just as cold without the man's presence, as well. Rather, the environment is indifferent to the man, as it frequently is in naturalist literature. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way, and it will not notice if he perishes. In the same way, the dog does not care about the man, only about itself.

Even London does not seem to care about the man too much--or, more precisely, he does not make any overt moral judgments about the man. He merely conveys the objective facts, pessimistic though they may be about the man. For instance, in describing the man's inability to make mental leaps, London only states "That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head." London never denounces outright the man's foolhardiness; his most aggressive comment, "The trouble with him was that he was without imagination," is only a suggestion that the man will encounter trouble because of this deficit.

Likewise, London maintains an air of neutrality with his prose, objective and reportorial. He focuses mostly on the narrative and little on the man's interior world and history--indeed, we never even know the man's (or the dog's) name. He is less an individual and more a representative of all humanity, especially humanity up against nature. Also in keeping with the naturalist tradition, the man is obviously not a member of the upper class. Like "the boys," he hopes to strike it rich by prospecting for gold, as did many during the Yukon Gold Rush in the late 19th-century, or even by selling logs.

One major point of naturalism not discussed yet is determinism. It will become more important in the next part of the story.

Second Part Summary:

In a seemingly safe, solid spot, the man falls through the snow and wets himself up to his shins. He curses his luck; starting a fire and drying his foot-gear will delay him at least an hour. He gathers brush and builds a fire, aware that his numb feet must not remain wet. His exposed fingers (necessary to make the fire) are also numb, and having stopped walking, his heart no longer pumps warming blood as much throughout his body. But the fire builds up, and the man feels safe. He remembers the old-timer from Sulphur Creek who had warned him that no man should travel in the Klondike alone when the temperature was fifty degrees below zero. He thinks the old-timers are "womanish," and that even with his "accident," he had saved himself in solitude. Nevertheless, it is extremely cold, and his fingers are almost completely numb.

The man unties his icy moccasins, but before he can cut the frozen strings on them, clumps of snow from the spruce tree above fall down and snuff out the fire. Though building a fire in the open would have been wiser, it had been easier for the man to take twigs from the spruce tree and drop them directly below on to the fire. Each time he pulled a twig, he had slightly agitated the tree until, at this point, a bough high up had capsized its load of snow. It capsized lower boughs in turn until a small avalanche had blotted out the fire.

Analysis

Naturalism maintains that individuals do not have free will, but that their environment shapes their behavior. The naturalistic world is based on a series of links, each of which causes the next (these causal links can be viewed as processes). Humans are never the first causal link; our actions are caused and determined by social, environmental, and biological factors. This philosophy, called determinism, is crucial in explaining why the naturalistic world is amoral. (Note: amorality is not the same as immorality. Immorality signifies a "bad" morality, while amorality means an absence of morality.) We see this amorality at play when the man falls through the snow: he curses his "luck." "Luck" suggests an action out of an individual's control; it is "luck" whether one wins the lottery or not. There is no moral judgment on his action; falling through the snow seems simply like bad luck, since the "unbroken snow seemed to advertise its solidity beneath." The man himself uses the word "accident" to describe the event. An accident also suggests something out of one's control, an unforeseen or unanticipated event.

For both problems that develop with the snow, London simply states "it happened." This phrasing implies passivity, even paralysis, on the part of the man, to whom "it" has "happened." He has not created the unlucky events--"it"--and therefore cannot take responsibility. Nature has indifferently and deterministically created these new conditions for the man. Indifferent, again, because it does not care if the man is there or not. Deterministic, because it seems fated and the man could not have avoided it.

Or could he have? Of the second accident, London ambiguously writes that it was the man's "own fault or, rather, his mistake." Why does London revise his definition? A "fault" implies free will and a role in the consequences that develop. The word "mistake," however, is much like "accident"; it is a less moral term that implies an isolated incident out of one's control. (A person usually makes a single "mistake" in an entire process, whereas if the person is at "fault," the responsibility of the entire process seems to rest on him.) Still, "mistake" suggests some individual responsibility or lack thereof, at least more than "luck" does. How, then, does individual responsibility exist in naturalism, which denies the existence of individual will? Put simply, if humans are not even in control of our own actions, why should we take responsibility for them?

Naturalism maintains that one should take responsibility insofar as one can anticipate potential consequences. Since the naturalistic world is based on causal links, it should be possible, to an extent, to predict the consequences of our actions. The man could not have anticipated his falling through the snow, and therefore it is merely bad luck. However, he should have anticipated that his other action--building a fire under a spruce tree--could carry potentially significant consequences--the snuffing out of the fire. Only in this anticipatory sense is he somewhat responsible.

Why should the man have anticipated danger? Other than ignoring the old-timer's advice and foolishly and lazily building the fire under the spruce tree, the man has proven himself incapable of making the associative mental projections that reveal causal links. London told us this much in the first half of the story; the man refused to meditate upon the cold and expand his thinking to more universal ideas about mortality. Moreover, the man frequently works with processes (again, processes are the causal links in the naturalistic world), such as building fires. But he pays attention to these processes only when they somehow benefit him, as with the fire. When the process is potentially harmful, he ignores it; London even refers to the causal agitation of the boughs of the spruce tree as a "process."

The man's unwillingness to think more deeply about processes saddles him with some of the responsibility for the fire's going out. However, we can also argue that the man seems not only unwilling, but also incapable, of thinking about these processes. Therefore, he never could have anticipated the fire's going out, and he cannot be held responsible. That London calls the second event the man's "fault," then his "mistake," suggests a blend of the two arguments: the man should have anticipated many of the dangers in the Yukon, but nature ultimately determines his behavior.

Third Part Summary:

The man is scared, and thinks the old-timer was right: a trail-mate would be useful now in building a new fire. He sets himself to building it, aware that he is already going to lose a few toes from frostbite. With increasingly numb fingers, he grabs undesirable small twigs as the dog watches him.

The man reaches for a piece of birch-bark in his pocket, but his numb fingers cannot feel it. He fights off the thought that his feet are freezing, and beats his hands against his body to restore circulation. The dog watches him, and the man is envious of the dog's natural warmth. The man gets some sensation in his fingers, removes his mitten, and takes out a bunch of matches. But his fingers grow numb again and he drops the matches in the snow. His fingers are lifeless and cannot pick up the matches. Without the sense of touch, he uses vision alone to guide his fingers, and he "will[s]" them to close in on the matches.

He eventually bites a match and lights it on his leg. But the smoke goes into his nostrils and lungs, he coughs, and he drops it into the snow. He grabs the whole bunch of matches--seventy in total--and lights them on his leg, all at once. He holds them to the bark but soon becomes aware that his flesh is burning. Unable to bear it, he lets go, and the matches fall and go out into the snow. The bark is on fire, though, and he adds grass and twigs to it. In guarding the fire against pieces of moss from the grass, he scatters the twigs, and the fire goes out.

The man looks at the dog, and remembers hearing about a man who, caught in a blizzard, killed a steer and crawled inside its warm carcass. The man decides to kill the dog and puts his hands inside its warm body. He calls out to the dog, but something fearful and strange in his voice frightens the dog. The man crawls toward the dog, which moves aside. The man regains his composure and calls normally to the dog. When it comes forward, the man flails out at it, but his frozen, numb fingers cannot move. Still, he grabs the snarling dog in his arms. The man realizes he cannot kill the dog, since he is unable to pull out his knife or even throttle the animal. He lets it go, and it moves away from him. The man tries to restore circulation in his hands, but they are lifeless.

The man realizes that frostbite is now a less worrisome prospect than death. He panics and runs fearfully along the creek trail, the dog at his heels. Perhaps the running will restore his circulation. Even if he loses some fingers and toes, he might at least near his destination, where the boys could tend to him. He keeps blocking out the thought that he will soon die. He feels like his frozen feet are skimming across the surface. But his endurance gives out, and finally he falls and cannot rise. He decides to rest, then later walk. He feels warm within, although he has no sensation. He fights against the thought of his body freezing, but it is too powerful a vision, and he runs again.

He falls again, and the dog sits nearby and watches him, which angers the man. The man makes one last panicked run and falls once more. He decides he has been acting foolishly, and it would be better to meet death in a more dignified manner. He imagines himself with the boys tomorrow and coming across his own body. He imagines telling the old-timer that he was right.

The man falls off into a comfortable sleep. The dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow like that without making a fire. At night, it comes closer and detects death in the man's scent. It backs away, and later runs away in the direction of the camp, "where were the other food-providers and fire-providers."

Analysis

Survival becomes the primary motivation for the man as he defends himself against nature. His increasingly desperate attempts to restore warmth to his freezing body contrast with the indifference of the Yukon. The environment merely remains the same--brutally cold--and does not care at all about the man's survival.

What is also significant within the environment is the importance of numbers. We already know that the temperature plays a crucial role, and that fifty degrees below zero demarcates the danger zone. The reader learns a new number here: seventy, the number of matches the man has. London could have simply kept stating that the man has a "bunch" of matches, but he tells us the exact number when they light. Time also plays a key role for the man, as does distance to the camp. Naturalism maintains that the world is knowable only through objective science. Hard facts, like degrees of Fahrenheit or the number of matches, make this particular world knowable.

The man finally takes these facts and makes conjectures about the future, unlike before where he refuses to think about processes. While he initially fights off ideas of his dying, he later engages in causal thinking, entertaining visions of his body freezing and even of finding his own body the next day, a truly abstract, futuristic mode of thought. But by now it is too late--projections of causal links will do little for him at this point.

His projections are pointless because whatever free will naturalism had afforded the man before (none, technically, but he could at least make decisions) has completely vanished by this section of the story. Hands are man's naturally selected advantage, and allow us to use tools, themselves the products of man's intellect. But here the man's hands betray him. He cannot operate the matches properly, nor can he use his knife, so both tools go to waste. In nature, his intellect turns out to be useless.

Instead, the dog's instinct prevails. It not only instinctively recognizes that the man is trying to deceive it some way, but its own naturally selected advantages--its fur coat, especially--keep it safe and warm. While the dog may not have the intellectual capacity to create fire and food for itself, it instinctively knows where the providers of these necessities are. In an indifferent, brutal environment, London maintains, this is a far more valuable resource than intellectuality.

• Biography of Jack London
• About To Build a Fire
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Part I
• Summary and Analysis of Part II
• Summary and Analysis of Part III
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• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase To Build a Fire and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Essays on To Build a Fire
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