The plot

The story starts with an exposition: an unnamed man starts out on an extremely cold, gray morning. As it has already been mentioned the story takes place in a very severe winter. The man is unaware of how cold it is and underestimates the danger. He wants to get to the camp at Henderson Creek where his friends are waiting for him. There's a dog walking at his heels, and only the dog seems to realize how extremely cold it is. Even at the bare beginning of the story there is a hint of foreshadowing of the trouble that is to come when the author mentions, “It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark.”

The plot grows out of a conflict between the character and natural forces. The nature, however doesn’t work against the man on purpose. If he hadn’t been travelling out there, it would have been exactly the same cold anyway. The man is warned about possible dangers, but he is also too pride and too self-confident assuming he is stronger than the forces of nature.

The story is carefully structured around the building of several fires. The first one is a success. However, the dog continues to have its doubts about traveling on such a cold day, and it doesn't want to leave the fire when the man gets up to keep walking.

Rising action begins when the man, despite all the precautions that he took, gets his feet wet. He succeeds in building another fire, but his fingers are getting too cold to bend or feel anything. When his next attempt similarly fails, the man becomes panicky.

The advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek reoccurs in the man’s head several times throughout the story. At first he just laughs at it, but as the plot unfolds he starts to realize that the man has spoken the truth. So, “one must not be too sure of things”. The character manages to calm his fears and tries over and over again, but all in vain.

The story comes to its climax when the man gets a wild idea. He decides to warm his hands by killing his dog and burying his hands into its warm body. But after making a try, he realizes that he has no way of killing it with his hands being numb and senseless. Being really desperate the man starts running to the camp, but eventually gives up.

Then goes the falling action. The man sits down and decides to “meet his death with dignity”.  He lets himself to fall asleep. Before freezing to death he has the visions of his friends finding his dead body. Then he sees the old-timer from Sulphur Creek and admits “You were right, old hoss; you were right".

Resolution. The dog sits for a while, waiting for the man to set a fire. Yearning for the fire it started whining loudly and then trotted in the direction of the camp knowing it is the only way to survive.

 In "To Build a Fire," Jack London uses the third-person point of view narration. It allows London to create distance between the character and the reader and to cast judgment on his main character’s actions. It helps to  illustrate the theme of the story, that is a man’s arrogance in the natural world  results in his untimely death. The outsider narrator refers to the main character as “the man.” Later, in the story, the narrator also refers to the man using the pronoun “he.” Thus, dispassionate and to some extent judgmental tone is achieved.  The use of the third-person point of view allows the reader to see the man as London sees him – as an arrogant, foolish and naive man.