He time and again snubs the warnings that he is receiving from nature. He encountered many warnings that it was too cold to be outside. First, his nose and cheeks went numb. His face, feet and hands followed. His beard grew icy and when he spit the spittle froze in the air before it hit the ground. Beating his hands and rubbing his face helped the situation temporarily. After he got his feet wet they froze. He "became aware of sensation in his hand." When he lit the last fire he smelled his flesh burning, he could not feel it. In his arrogance, the man disregarded the warnings of nature, and terrible cold.
In the end the man finally realizes the seriousness of the situation that his arrogance has put him in.
A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.
Without a doubt, the man now realized that the Yukon had already defeated him. Panicking, the man ran around again ”like a chicken with its head cut off,”(1772) for the last time trying to change his inevitable fate. Not having any success, the man tries once again to block out his meager view of what was left of his last moments of life by thinking of other things like when the man says that "when he got back to the states he could tell the folks what real cold was". Since the man didn't listen to the advice of experienced people, he was ignorant and never expected to be defeated by the climate. If the man had prepared himself for the worst, his death would not have been inevitable.
Pope John Paul II said that, “Of all the causes that conspire to blind man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, what the weak head with strongest bias rules, is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.” This quote seems tailor-made for the man in London’s story. In Proverbs 16:8 in the bible it says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,”(Proverbs 16:8) and this is exactly what happened to the man. Pride is what made the man think that he could brave the wilderness and cold of the harsh Yukon Territory. Pride is a common element in many stories and seems to always lead to the misfortune of the prideful. Some of London’s own stories deal with pride. Although not a story of human pride, the novel The Call of the Wild deals with Buck’s fight against the proud Spitz.
In Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” the man in the story is killed by his overconfidence and arrogance in his ability and knowledge to withstand the cold of the frigid Yukon. As a result, he freezes to death wishing he had taken the advice of the old man who represented knowledge and wisdom.
Works Cited
London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Sixth Edition. Nina Baym: Norton, 1980. 1762-1772
Mackey, David. 15 Jan. 2001 .
New Testament, The. National Publishing Company. Copywrite 1968