This paper is a discussion of the elements that make Jack London's short story, "To Build a Fire," a classic example of naturalistic literature. The story also demonstrates the principles of determinism and social Darwinism in its account of a man who has enough knowledge to feel confident in his ability to travel alone with a dog in the Yukon but not enough to avoid the tragic results of his over-confidence. In minute and careful detail, London chronicles each of the man's actions that lead, inevitably, to his death, the result of a series of small but fatal mistakes with inevitable consequences.
Gabriel Jodkins, et al, write, "Of the major questions that we challenge ourselves with, geography and geographers historically focus most intensively on pondering those related to how we construct our relationships with the non-human world and how that non-human world in turn affects us" (17). In "To Build a Fire," London, who obviously drew on personal experience with the natural world, takes his readers into a place where "one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained" (2), and shows how the human visitor's relationship to nature can be a tenuous one indeed. Naturalistic literature was a literary movement that included the time of London's writings in which author's tried to be as brutally realistic as possible, and London is able to take this one step farther by creating work that is quite literally natural. His spare, simple language opens up the Yukon to readers who will never visit it except through his words, and his tale of a man's death in the frozen North is unlikely to tempt readers to visit in any other way.
H.O. Mounce describes naturalism as the belief that "our knowledge has its source not in our experience or reasoning but in our relations to a world which transcends both our knowledge and ourselves" (2). In London's story, the world quite literally transcends the man, overcoming his attempts to ...