What Clues About The Man Can You Draw Based On His Responses To The Old Timer

Advisor: Jennifer Fleissner, Associate Professor of English, Indiana Academy; National Humanities Centre Fellow
© 2016 National Humanities Heart

How can we read "To Build a Fire" as a cautionary tale near the exploitation of nature?

Understanding

Jack London's story "To Build a Fire" warns non only against trekking through a wilderness at 70-five below but also against seeing nature simply as a resource to be exploited and controlled.

Jack London (1876–1916)

Text

Jack London, "To Build a Fire," 1908

Text Type

Literary Fiction; Short Story

Text Complication

Grades 4–5 complication band.

For more information on text complexity meet these resources from achievethecore.org.

In the Text Analysis section, Tier 2 vocabulary words are divers in pop-ups, and Tier three words are explained in brackets.

Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

X

Mutual Core Land Standards

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.ix–10.1 (Cite evidence to support explicit and inferential references)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9–10.2 (Determine evolution of a theme over the class of a text…)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.nine–10.3 (Analyze how complex characters develop…)
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9–10.iv (Meaning of words and phrases… figurative and connotative…)

Teacher's Note

This lesson develops what might exist called an environmentalist interpretation of "To Build a Fire." The reading turns on the nameless protagonist's lack of imagination and his inability to reply to the natural earth in annihilation more than superficial and utilitarian terms. In the offset of the story the narrator describes a landscape that sends powerful signals of danger and doom, still the protagonist, incapable of apprehending the "significances" of things, responds only to the cold, which he sees, not every bit something that could kill him, but simply as a source of discomfort. Despite being devoid of self-awareness and marvel, even so, he can read nature in a detail way, every bit a article, a source of gold and timber, to exist exploited. His attitude toward nature is further defined by his relationship to the dog that accompanies him: the animal is his "toil-slave," dominated and controlled by the "whip-lash."

Having established the protagonist's attitude toward nature, the analysis turns to the "old-timer from Sulfur Creek," who, though unseen, is a major character in the story. The lesson challenges students to infer the old-timer's attitude toward nature from the advice he offers and to compare it to the protagonist'south view of the natural earth. Noting the juxtaposition of images of the two men at the end of the story — one dead on a snow banking company, the other safe and warm in his motel — the lesson asks which view of nature the story endorses.

The lesson develops this interpretation past analyzing nine brief excerpts, covered through four sets of close reading questions. It could exist used in form by assigning ane group of students sets 1 and two and a second sets three and 4.

The textual analysis does not explore the story's naturalistic elements, but the interactive do contrasts naturalism with romanticism and realism and asks students to identify passages every bit examples of each. Information technology offers an excellent opportunity to assess students' understanding of naturalism and to review romanticism and realism. Information technology is written then that information technology can be discrete from this lesson and used as a stand up-alone exercise.

The lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher's guide includes a background annotation, the interactive exercise described in a higher place, a text analysis with answers to close reading questions, and an optional follow-up assignment. The student version, an interactive PDF, includes all of the above, except for the answers to the shut reading questions and the follow-up assignment.

Teacher'south Guide

Background

Background Questions

1. What kind of text are nosotros dealing with?
2. When was it written?
3. Who wrote it?
4. For what audience was it intended?
5. For what purpose was it written?

The word "pedestrian" has two meanings. Every bit a noun, it denotes a person who is walking; as an adjective it means unimaginative. The protagonist of Jack London'due south brusque story "To Build a Fire" dies because both meanings apply to him. A pedestrian blow — he steps into a spring when the temperature is seventy-five beneath — is the immediate crusade of his expiry. His pedestrian intellect — he cannot grasp the "significances" of things — is the ultimate cause of his death. Focusing on the latter, this lesson explores how his lack of imagination leads to his demise.

Jack London (1876–1916) based "To Build a Fire" on his feel in the Klondike region of northwestern Canada. The discovery of gold there in 1896 set off a frenzy that led thousands of prospectors to claiming its harsh climate and terrain. In the late 1890s London's efforts to launch a writing career had stalled, and he yearned for an audacious and possibly lucrative escape from publishers and rejection letters. His brother-in-police besides dreamed of striking it rich and agreed to finance an expedition that would accept both of them to the golden fields. They left San Francisco on July 25, 1897. On the trip north they befriended three other prospectors, and the five decided to pool their talents. They arrived in Juneau, Alaska, on Baronial two and set up out for the Klondike. After climbing mountains, shooting treacherous rapids, and enduring miserable living conditions, London and his companions ready upwards military camp near Dawson City in October. While there he spent much of his time in saloons listening to prospectors' alpine tales almost living in the wilderness. A winter in shut quarters with four other men and a steady nutrition defective fresh vegetables left him emotionally wearied and suffering from scurvy. In June 1898 he started his journey back to San Francisco, arriving there the post-obit month. He stepped off the boat with simply $4.fifty worth of aureate dust^one but with a treasure of material that would fuel his imagination for years to come.

That treasure would have seemed like a paltry thing to the protagonist of "To Build a Fire." As the narrator points out, the "problem" with "the human being" is that his thinking has remained resolutely earthbound. He has never launched himself into "the conjectural field" to contemplate such matters equally human frailty, death, or his place in the universe. Why does the narrator tell u.s. that? After all, how useful are deep thoughts when you are plodding through deep snowfall? Practical noesis rather that philosophic speculation sustains the man through much of the story: he can, for example, navigate overland with impressive accuracy, and he tin can start a fire in a fuel-starved environment with a single match. Had he avoided the accident, those skills, not musings about immortality, might have gotten him to the old claim, frostbitten, to be certain, but alive.

Mention of the old claim reminds us that the protagonist is a prospector, and, as we learn, he hopes to become a logger also. His perception of nature is as utilitarian as the knowledge that almost gets him to that warm camp and dinner with the boys. He does non make it, withal, and with his death the story argues that a utilitarian conception of nature is not enough. The natural globe, as we meet, exacts a terrible toll on those who cannot recognize its power and mystery and who effort to reduce it to nothing more than an economical resource.

^ane Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 51.

Text Analysis

Part 1: The Yukon

Shut Reading Questions

one. What are the chief characteristics of the mural in which the protagonist finds himself?
It is greyness and extremely common cold; note the repetition in the showtime judgement. It is strange: there is no sun on a clear day. It is nighttime, gloomy, foreboding, and ominous. Excerpt two highlights the landscape's vastness — "a grand miles… a g miles and half a thousand more" — and its desolation — "all pure white." It is mysterious and dangerously deceptive: its gentle undulations conceal the h2o that will later prove fatal.

2. What foreshadowings does extract 1 include?
The protagonist finds himself winded when he climbs the earth-banking company, foreshadowing his lack of endurance when, late in the story, he contemplates running to his destination. The word "pall" refers not merely to the overarching atmosphere of gloom only besides to a shroud that covers a coffin, foreshadowing his fate.

iii. Extract 1 is written from the point of view of the omniscient narrator, extract 2 from that of the protagonist. As such information technology records what he focuses on every bit he looks back over the path he has travelled. What he picks out of the landscape is significant and, as we shall see, offers insight into his perception of nature. What features does he note?
It is of import to have students notation the protagonist'due south concentration on the Yukon River: its ice jams, its twists and curves, and its relationship to the bandbox-covered islands. Moreover, he places these details in the context of distance to common salt water and to cities.

The significance of these observations volition get clear in the lesson's assay of extract four, where we learn that the protagonist is a would-exist logger. Equally someone who hopes to cutting timber on the islands, he is, in excerpt 2, assessing the river's capacity to carry logs to market place. Thus here at the very opening of the story the narrator suggests the protagonist's utilitarian view of nature along with his obliviousness to the danger posed past the desolate white landscape he is surveying. His perception of nature as a resources blinds him to its power.

ane. 24-hour interval had broken cold and grayness, exceedingly cold and gray, when the human turned aside from the primary Yukon trail and climbed the high globe-depository financial institution, where a dim and little-travelled trail led e through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the height, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. There was no dominicus nor hint of sun, though there was non a cloud in the sky. It was a clear twenty-four hours, and still in that location seemed an intangible pall over the face up of things, a subtle gloom that made the solar day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of lord's day. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass earlier that cheerful orb, due s, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.

2. The human being flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this water ice were as many feet of snowfall. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the water ice-jams of the freeze-upwards had formed. North and due south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a night hair-line that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared backside another spruce-covered island. This night hair-line was the trail — the main trail — that led s five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Laissez passer, Dyea, and salt h2o; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the northward a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.

Role 2: The Man'south Response to the Yukon

Close Reading Questions

4. In the story's opening paragraphs the narrator describes a landscape meant to impress, and he seems to think that it should impress the protagonist. Why does he retrieve that?
He thinks that the landscape should print the protagonist considering of its mystery and strangeness and because its qualities are new to him; it'due south his first feel with winter in the Yukon.

5. The landscape does not impress the protagonist. What does, and how does it impress him?
The cold impresses him, and it does so simply to the extent that it makes him uncomfortable. He experiences the earth only on the level of the senses; he responds with no intellection.

vi. What does the narrator mean when he says that the protagonist is "without imagination" and that he is non alert to the "significances" of things?
The narrator is referring to an intellectual dullness, a pedestrian, matter-of-fact vision that never transcends or inquires beyond the earthbound, the obvious, and the superficial. Later in the paragraph he expands his critique to include a lack of cocky-awareness: the protagonist never contemplates matters like human frailty, death, or his place in the universe. Every bit we shall run across, his ordeal leads him to contemplate all of these matters.

7. Clearly, the narrator thinks that the protagonist's response to the landscape is inadequate: "Simply all this… made no impression." In what ways is it inadequate?
The protagonist fails to recognize the mystery, strangeness, and danger in the landscape. For him nature is nil more than the cold.

8. The protagonist interprets the cold as merely something that causes discomfort, something to be guarded against by bundling upwards. Had he been alert to "significances," how might he accept interpreted the cold?
He might have seen it as a powerful force that could kill him. This misreading of the cold is emblematic of his failure to give the natural world its due and to comprehend his precarious identify in information technology, and that failure sets him up for the tragedy that ensues.

3. But all this — the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sunday from the heaven, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of information technology all — fabricated no impression on the man. Information technology was not considering he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, a cheechako, and this was his commencement wintertime. 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 non in the significances. Fifty degrees below nix meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him equally existence cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did non atomic number 82 him to meditate upon his frailty every bit a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on information technology did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man'due south place in the universe. Fifty degrees below cipher stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him but precisely fifty degrees below zero. That in that location should be anything more to information technology than that was a thought that never entered his head.
…

Part 3: The Man'due south Attitude toward Nature

Close Reading Questions

As we accept seen thus far, the protagonist is incapable of reading the hints of danger and doom the wilderness is sending him. Simply he is notwithstanding capable of understanding the landscape in a particular fashion.

9. In excerpt four nosotros discover why the protagonist is trekking beyond the frigid Yukon: he is heading for an former mining claim, but he has taken a roundabout fashion — a fatal choice, as it turns out — to determine how he might move logs, cut in the area, to market place. How does this fact explain the landscape details he notes in excerpt 2?
Remind students of their responses to question 3. As we noted there, the protagonist is assessing the river's chapters to acquit logs to market.

10. Excerpt 2, which is the second paragraph in the story, suggests how the protagonist perceives nature. Excerpts 4, 5, and 6 tell us explicitly. In excerpt 4 we learn that he is a prospector and a would-be logger. In v we acquire that the canis familiaris is no pet: the man imperils the dog'southward life past sending him across dangerous water ice. The clarification of the dog as a "toil-slave," mastered through the "whip-lash," in excerpt six defines the relationship between the protagonist and the canis familiaris and, by extension, between the protagonist and the natural world. Based on these passages, how would you narrate the protagonist'south attitude toward nature?
He sees the natural world as a resource — a repository of gold and timber — to be exploited. Instead of viewing nature every bit a living thing with its own power, deserving of respect, he sees it every bit a commodity to exist mined, cut, and sold. Furthermore, his treatment of the domestic dog suggests that he views nature as something that exists simply to serve him, something he can command and dominate.

4. But the temperature did non matter. He was spring for the sometime claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come up over beyond the divide from the Indian Creek land, while he had come the roundabout way to have a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon.
…
v. Unremarkably the snow higher up the subconscious pools had a sunken, candied advent that advertised the danger. Once again, nonetheless, he had a shut telephone call; and one time, suspecting danger, he compelled the domestic dog to go on in front. The domestic dog did not want to go. It hung back until the man shoved it forward, and and then information technology went rapidly across the white, unbroken surface. All of a sudden it bankrupt through, floundered to i side, and got away to firmer footing.
…
6. [The dog knew] it was the time to prevarication snug in a hole in the snow and expect for a drapery of cloud to be drawn across the face up of outer infinite whence this common cold came. On the other hand, in that location was no slap-up intimacy betwixt the dog and the human. The one was the toil-slave of the other, and the merely caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing pharynx-sounds that threatened the whip-lash.

Role 4: The Human being and the Old-Timer

Shut Reading Questions

Although we never see the one-time-timer from Sulfur Creek, he is a major character in the story. He appears over and over once again as the protagonist recalls the communication he gave him.

11. How is the protagonist's attitude toward nature reflected in excerpt vii, and how does his attitude help to explicate his dismissal of the old-timer's advice?
His satisfaction at saving himself reflects his belief that he can prevail over nature. Firmly believing that, why should he listen to the "womanish" (note the gendering of weakness) advice of an old homo?

12. From the advice he offers, what tin can nosotros infer nearly the old-timer's mental attitude toward nature? Compare it to the protagonist'southward.
He is an "onetime timer," whose long experience has taught him to understand and respect the power of nature. Unlike the protagonist, he is aware of human frailty and knows that the human being control of nature cannot be counted on, especially in extreme circumstances.

thirteen. Nosotros began this analysis past noting that the protagonist lacked self-sensation. How might we say that, through his ordeal, nature has brought him to self-awareness, has led him to run into his place in the universe?
In excerpt viii we see that his ordeal has, quite literally, enabled him to envision his identify in the universe, which happens to be a snow bank in the Yukon on which he is sprawled, frozen to death.

fourteen. The story ends with the juxtaposition of two images: the protagonist lying expressionless in the snow and the old-timer comfortable in his cabin. How does the story judge the ii attitudes toward nature represented past these men?
Here is where we see that the story can be read as a cautionary tale. Clearly, by killing off the prospector / potential logger as a result of his pedestrian, commonsensical concept of nature, it is warning against reducing nature to a mere article. In add-on, it dramatizes the folly of thinking that humans can master the natural world. By picturing the old-timer puffing on his pipe in a warm, comfortable cabin, the story illustrates the wisdom of a perception of nature informed by an awareness of and respect for its power and mystery.

seven. He was condom. He remembered the communication of the one-time-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike afterward 50 below. Well, hither he was; he had had the accident; he was solitary; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a human being had to do was to keep his head, and he was all correct. Whatever man who was a human could travel solitary.
…
eight. Then the thought came to him that the frozen portions of his body must be extending. He tried to go along this thought downwardly, to forget it, to think of something else; he was enlightened of the panicky feeling that information technology caused, and he was agape of the panic. But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until information technology produced a vision of his body totally frozen. This was too much, and he made some other wild run along the trail. Once he slowed downwardly to a walk, just the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again.
…
nine. He pictured the boys finding his body adjacent day. All of a sudden he found himself with them, coming along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn in the trail and constitute himself lying in the snow. He did not belong with himself any more, for even then he was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow. It certainly was common cold, was his thought. When he got back to u.s. he could tell the folks what real cold was. He drifted on from this to a vision of the quondam-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could come across him quite clearly, warm and comfy, and smoking a pipe.

---

Follow-Upwardly Consignment

Like Jack London, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), the writer of the Civil War novel The Ruddy Badge of Backbone, wrote in a naturalistic vein. In an untitled verse form of just twenty-4 words, reproduced below, he captured much of naturalism'southward attitude toward the natural world and the place of humans within it. As either a written or discussion assignment — your instructor volition decide which — describe how "To Build a Fire" reflects the attitudes expressed in Crane'southward poem.

A human being said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"Yet," replied the universe,
"The fact has non created in me
A sense of obligation."

---

Vocabulary Pop-Ups

• intangible: incapable of existence touched, not solid
• pall: gloomy temper
• undulations: hills
• conjectural: interpretative

Source: https://americainclass.org/to-build-a-fire-an-environmentalist-interpretation/

Posted by: dickensanyted.blogspot.com

Share this post