The modern fireplace is an invisible marvel of technology, a contained conflagration triggered by the flip of a switch and without error or human intervention. It is only recently, and in the comfort of home, that lighting a fire has become so simple. As its title suggests, Jack London's 1908 short story contains within its narrative a literal set of sequential instructions on how to "make a fire." London extends this sequential conceit to his fateful vision of the universe. Unlike the dog in the story, who can rely on his purebred arctic instincts to navigate across the dangerous tundra, the anonymous man possesses a duller, myopic instinct that is incapable of foreseeing the consequences of the environment. This instinctive defect of humanity (compared to that of a husky) is obvious, but man does not manage to compensate by integrating intellectuality into his path. If he used all his resources efficiently, as the dog does, man could anticipate the chain of events that lead to his demise, then literally and figuratively change his trajectory. Such deconstruction of a predetermined universe is possible, London suggests, to the extent that the reader is made aware - through parallelism, choice formulations and other stylistic and suspenseful devices - of the subtle ways in which events seemingly disconnected are causally linked. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay London launches an investigation into the patterns of connection in the first two sentences by creating a landscape of connections, layers, and progression: The day was broken it was cold and gray, bitterly cold and gray, when the man strayed from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high dirt bank, where a dark, little-used path led east through the thick spruce forest. It was a steep bank and he stopped to catch his breath at the top, excusing himself as he looked at his watch. (462) The care that London takes in producing a connective atmosphere is delicate but insistent. The adverbial and prepositional clauses - "when the man turned away", "where it is dark", "through the big spruce forest" - create in the reader's mind a solid, moving picture of progression of man on a metaphorical scale that extends horizontally. as much as vertically. Even the modifying adverb "exceedingly" modifies the first dark "The day was cold and gray", indicating to the reader the likelihood that the temperature will get worse throughout the story (or at least the man's reaction to it). this situation). Throughout the story, man can only repeat to himself, “It was certainly cold,” adding a certainty to his current observation rather than a prediction like “extremely” does. London further capitalizes on this stage moment to expose man's status as a foil to the environmental chain, an unanchored actor who begins the story in stasis and will end in the same position. On the heights (verticality will play an important role later), the man “takes a break(s)” to check the time. Rather than continuing to merge with a fluid environment, its only definition of progression is temporal, technological and not geographical. Seeing the world in numerical terms – the narrator, or man, later evaluates the invisible "dark hairline" of the main trail in terms of mileage to various checkpoints – rather than in spatial terms foreshadows his downfall literal. The man looks "back at the path he has traveled" instead of looking forward on his route, and the description of the terrain does notas a "no impression on man" pun, as few warning signs in history do: "The Yukon lies a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice." Above this ice were as many feet of pure white snow, rolling in gentle undulations where the frost jams had formed" (462). The causal relationship between the layers will become crucial later in this history, and for man to see only the "pure white" surface and not suspect a threat lurking beneath is astutely summarized by London when he describes man's next stage: "He sank among the great spruces” (463) What prevents the man from seeing more than the surface and refraining from such a daring plunge, is explicitly described from the beginning by London: He was keen and alert in the things of life, but only in things, and not in meanings. Fifty degrees below zero meant about eighty degrees of frost. This fact seemed cold and uncomfortable to him, and that was all. not led to meditate on his fragility in general, capable only of living within narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there it did not take him to the conjectural realm of immortality and man's place in the universe. (463) One of the main obsessions of naturalism, that of processes, of omniscient descriptions of how water flows from a tank to a faucet to a drain, of how meat is transformed in food and is digested by the body, is of no importance to humans. . He is unwilling to call upon his predictive intellect, even when the evidence invites analysis of the processes: "The man's red beard and mustache were also frozen, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and increasing with each hot, humid breath he exhaled. » (464). The man refuses to consider the consequences, even when his future is threatened by accidents: “And all the time, in his consciousness, there was the awareness that at every moment his feet were freezing. This thought tended to panic him, but he fought against it and kept calm” (472). Compare this description to the pessimistic scenario he struggles with as he runs shortly before his death: "...and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This thought he kept in the background and refused to consider . Sometimes she pushed forward and demanded to be heard, but he pushed her away and tried to think of something else” (476). are reasonable. But during his previous attempts to resuscitate himself, he is unable to use his future plans in connection with the present action: “He pushed the idea of ​​his feet, his nose and his hands out of his mind. frozen cheeks, devoting his whole soul to the matches” (472). The mind-body connection is further disrupted once he actually loses the use of his hands, rendering the natural selection advantage of opposable thumbs moot. Instead of instinctive communication between his brain and body, man must compensate through sight: Dead fingers could neither touch nor grasp... He observed, using the sense of sight instead of that of touch, and when he saw his fingers on each side of the beam, he closed them, that is to say, he wanted to close them, because the wires were down and the fingers did not obey. (472) This movement away from a bodily posture towards its environment arouses in man the first glimmers of imagination and creativity. He finds it “curious that you have to use your eyes to know where your hands were” (475). This curiosity extends to the fact that "he could run with feet so frozen he couldn't feel themwhen they touched the earth and took the weight of his body” (476). As death approaches, man is totally detached from any connection with the environment: “He seemed to skim the surface and have no connection with the earth” (476). The disappearance of causality between his head and his body and between his body and the earth provokes in man an analogous imagination hitherto absent: "Somewhere, he had one day seen Mercury winged, and he wondered if Mercury felt what he felt when touching the earth” (476). The closer he gets to death, the more he abstracts himself, completely transporting his spirit from his body: "Then the thought came to him that the frozen parts of his body must expand... the thought asserted itself and persisted, until this produced a vision of his body totally frozen” (476) His initial solipsism, or at least the absence of an external gaze, is replaced by the external gaze, by the external view. grasps, he no longer sees himself as a man but as "a chicken with its head cut off - such is the comparison that came to his mind" (477). joined the boys in discovering his corpse: "He no longer had a place with himself, for even then he was beside himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow" (477) . This premonition comes far too late, activated only by the immediate appearance of death and not by its distant call. Even after this inspired vision of detachment, the reader once again remembers the static intellect that trapped. the man: “It was certainly cold, was his thought” (477). But his immobile intellect is only half the equation. Man's reliance on his weak instincts, especially in comparison with those of the native husky, plays a similar role in his ruin. Even their physical descriptions show their contrasting states of compatibility with the environment. The man may have had "warm whiskers, but his facial hair did little to protect the high cheekbones and eager nose that thrust aggressively into the frigid air" (464). His impudence in attacking nature is offset by his noble traits which are not designed for such a climate. The wolfdog, of course, may be "depressed by the terrible cold", but he is able to resist it and, moreover, recognize that "it was not the time to travel" (464). The difference is clarified by London: "His instinct told him a truer story than that which the judgment of man had told him... He felt a vague but threatening apprehension which overpowered him... and which made him reconsider eagerly questions every unusual movement of man” (464) Apprehension is the natural reaction in such a threatening situation to the animal mind, instinct being based on survival. something by his judgment, the dog needs no communication - he has no bond that can be broken. He bites the ice with his feet without delay and without absolutely needing the human invention of fire: “It was a matter of instinct. Letting the ice stay would mean foot pain. He didn't know it. He simply obeyed the mysterious prompting that emerged from the deep crypts of his being” (466-467). This same repressed instinct prevents the dog from falling into the man's trap to kill him and use his carcass as a source of heat: ... in his voice there was a strange note of fear which frightened the animal, which n I had never seen the man speak in such a way. well before. Something was wrong, and her suspicious nature sensed danger – she didn't know what danger, but somewhere, somehow, in her brain arose an apprehension of the man. (474)Once again, apprehension. Arrogance)..