To Build A Fire

Jack London’s To Build a Fire tells us about a man that goes off to Yukon on an extremely cold morning. The cold weather does not scare him since he rarely translates hard facts, such as the extreme coldness, into significant ideas, such as man's mortality. While he is traveling he only carries a sack of lunch in which he carries biscuits which he puts inside his jacket, for the purpose of warming them with his skin. He also has a husky dog that follows him. The man also has a lack of imagination. In this story the main motivations of the man is survival and to prove others that it is possible to go by yourself and travel under really cold temperatures and survive. There is a point in where the man sends the dog first after seeing the thin ice, the dog falls but as part of his instincts he comes out. The man takes his gloves off and as soon as he does that his fingers freeze. A little bit after that the man falls and gets soaking wet after, he tries to get out of the river and tries to start a fire but he could not light the matches and could not use his knife because his fingers were too numb for that. The man freezes to death because he did not have the proper knowledge, instincts and survival skills required in these cases. On the other hand the dog's instincts prevail and he survives. The dog may not have the intellectual capacity to create fire and food for himself, but he does know where the providers of these necessities are.