Complete Stylistic Analysis

  

     The story under analysis is written by Jack London, a prominent American novelist and short-story writer, journalist and social activist. Jack London wrote in a style known as "naturalism". This literary movement used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. The novels of Jack London are typically somewhat autobiographical. He is best known for books that center around a character in a struggle against nature, but there are also a great many buried themes and messages within his books.Though he wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death and the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, he also sought peace and quiet inspiration. His stories of high adventure were based on his own experiences at sea, in the Yukon Territory, and in the fields and factories of California. His writings appealed to millions worldwide.His novels, including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Martin Eden, placed London among the most popular American authors of his time.
     The story describes a man hiking in severe weather conditions, trying to get to the camp.
     The theme of the story is that a man's arrogance in the natural world will cause a trouble. The man is warned against going too far into the wild alone, but he does not listen because of his self-confidence. Though the central theme of the short story is the conflict of man vs. nature, another issue seems to be of no less importance. It is a man's desperate need of companions in a difficult situation. To my mind, the story's message is that no matter how self-confident and independent people are, they do need somebody to support them.
     The setting is one of the key factors that help us understand this story.  “To Build a Fire” is set in the Klondike in the Yukon Territory of Canada, the site of a gold rush in the late nineteenth century. The terrain is rugged, and the weather is harsh. Winter lasts seven months, most of them sunless. After gold was discovered there, the region was overrun with thousands of people in search of instant fortune. This fact makes us guess that the character of the story is one of them.

     The weather conditions are really severe. It is more than 50 degrees below zero - “the tremendous cold”. The readers can imagine the sensations one experiences in such conditions due to London’s detailed description of the cold wind and the ice crusting over the man's face: "The man's red beard and moustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was unable to clear his chin when he expelled the juice".  Throughout the story the descriptions like this make you feel the chill of the air, and make you bend your fingers to check whether they are not numb and frozen and you can still use them.
     Moreover, the surrounding is not only dangerous but really treacherous. There are traps in form of hidden spring pools, snow can at any moment fall from branches of spruces and blot your fire out. London places his character  in a harsh natural setting that tests his ability to survive in the wilderness. Thus, the story has a philosophical aspect.  It should make us "meditate upon [our] frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain limits of heat and cold" and eventually take us into "the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe".

      At the end of the story the man realizes how stupid of him was to ignore the old-timer’s advice “that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below”. Once again we understand that very often people cannot survive on their own. We can’t always rely only on ourselves. People need to stick together.

     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 literary work contains a flashback. 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 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. 
     The central character of the story is a man accompanied by a dog. The author does not indicate the name of either of them. London describes the character’s appearance with practical purpose, that is to show how it effects him while staying in such severe weather conditions: “He was a warm-whiskered man, but the hair on his face did not protect the high cheek-bones and the eager nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air.”
     The man is clearly not an experienced Yukon adventurer. “He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter.” He ignores all the facts that indicate danger and he underestimates the cold. The protagonist of London’s story is a vain creature, supremely and ironically confident of his ability to survive. The man thinks he is a self-sufficient, strong, independent and really tough person. “Any man who was a man could travel alone”, that's what he thinks. But for London’s cold tone the readers would sympathize the character more. The writer’s disapproval of the man’s way of thinking can be confirmed by the following quotation: “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.” The man seems to be unwilling or, perhaps, even incapable of looking for the deeper meaning in things. “Empty as the man's mind was of thoughts, he was keenly observant.” He accepts only facts and assigns them increasing significance.
     Unlike the dog, what the man truly lacks is instinct. The dog is the only one who knows how to survive. It has inherited this knowledge from all its ancestry. The animal here is not depicted as friendly or willing to help its master. “It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire.” However, one can’t say that the animal was not devoted to the man. It went all the time with him, at his heels. And all the man had to do was to pay a little bit more attention to the behavior of the dog and make some conclusions.
     Yet, the man has one trait that in my opinion is worth admiring. It’s his self-control. Experiencing a fear he had never known in his life he “struggled for calmness”. Trying to push away panic he is still able to think rationally and eventually to admit his mistake. “He thought in the moment of controlled despair that ensued: after fifty below, a man should travel with a partner.” The author emphasizes that the character manages to control his despair. Finally, the man decides to take his destiny decently.

     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.

     London's language is straightforward and easy to understand. Despite its dispassionate tone the story is not deprived of expressive means and stylistic devices. In order to present the character, to describe the setting, to reveal the main idea the author of the analyzed story resorts to the following devices:
     Lexical means:
     The story is rich in similes. They contribute to the description of the setting and of the character’s actions and states: Once, coming around a bend, he shied abruptly, like a startled horse. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. The thick German socks were like sheaths of iron half-way to the knees; and the mocassin strings were like rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration. If he fell down it would shatter itself, like glass, into brittle fragments. It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out! It was like taking an anaesthetic. Simile is also used to convey the character’s thoughts: His idea of it [death] was that he had been making a fool of himself, running around like a chicken with its head cut off – such was the simile that occurred to him.
     Metaphor is used to emphasize the importance and necessity of the sun in the Arctic: It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky- line and dip immediately from view.
     Oxymoron: the only caresses it [the dog] had ever received were the caresses of the whiplash and of harsh and menacing throat sounds that threatened the whiplash. The dog obeys the man not only because he provides fire and food, and with the help of oxymoron we are reminded that there is no love at all in the dog's obedience to the man, only violence and self-interest.
     Personification adds to the vividness of the description and makes it dramatic. For instance, the numbness laid hold of the exposed fingers; he noted the numbness creeping into the exposed fingers. The blood of his body recoiled before it [the cold]. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life with every dancing flame. Sometimes it [the thought] pushed itself forward and demanded to be heard. It [frost] was creeping into his body from all sides. We can assume that personification is also used to describe northern lights – a wonderful natural phenomenon: the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky.
     Epithets can be found throughout the entire story. They are used to characterize the things and events precisely. For example, an intangible pall over the face of things, gentle undulations, a sharp, explosive crackle, a generous slice of fried bacon, amber beard, a vague but menacing apprehension, the mysterious prompting, a roaring fire, helpless hands, fearful cold, tremendous cold, treacherous tree, sharp wolf-ears, its wolf-brush of a tail.
     Syntactical means: 
     Climax or gradation is employed to create emotional and logical influence upon the readers, to make them understand the seriousness of the situation the character is in. “But all this – the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all – made no impression on the man.” “In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below.” “Several times he stumbled, and finally he tottered, crumpled up, and fell.”
     Repetition attracts the readers’ attention to the fact that is the most important. “Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey…” “This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point.”
     Inversion is used to make the narration emotional, fresh and to underline the things that are significant. “And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled”. “All this the man knew.” “Lifeless they were”. “And all the time, in his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing”. “A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him”.
     Polysyndeton makes the text more rhythmical and contributes to the vivid description of the setting. “This dark hair-line was the trail -- the main trail--that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more”.

     Summing up the analysis of the story "To Build a Fire" one should say that Jack London brilliantly uses a variety of stylistic devices to create a true-to-life atmosphere, to reveal the character's nature and the main idea of the story.