Arrogance In To Build A Fire

Arrogance and The Trail of Death “To Build a Fire” is a short story written by the author Jack London, describing the journey of an inexperienced man with little imagination who loses his battle against mother nature and her tenacious climates. This short story portrays the thought of man vs. nature and how undeliberate the outcomes may be. The man in the story faced a great challenge and trudged through a Yukon trail in subzero temperatures; what he didn’t expect was to be frostbitten and have death breathing down his neck the entire way. The man overlooked the power of mother nature and came to realize he was painfully mistaken for going into the unknown, unaware. People have fatal flaws, arrogance seeps in and overpowers the wisdom and

In To Build a Fire, The man is showing dominance over his dog, who knows that his owner was mistaken for taking them out in such horrid temperatures. “The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgement” (London 1). London used the dog in his short story to represent pure instinct. While the dog has pure instinct the man focused on his rational thought. He only thought about the mileage he had to travel per hour and when the right time would be to eat his lunch, while on the other hand the dog had the instinct to “...lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of clouds to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came” (London 3). The dog and man show no signs of having a mutualistic relationship, in fact, during a time of panic, the man had come to the wild thought of killing his own dog to gain warmth from the inside of its body. “He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal…” (London 5). The Instinct Theory of Motivation explains, “All organisms are born with innate biological tendencies that help them survive” (Cherry). The dog had a feeling of being uncomfortable when his owner called out to him. He could sense in the man's

“He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth” (London 5). This metaphor shines light onto the theme of arrogance by showing how the man “disregarded the warning signs of nature, and terrible cold” (Bartleby) . On a more literal level, the man cannot feel his feet due to the lack of sensation and blood flow from the freezing temperature. On a more metaphorical level, the man is unrelated to the earth from being at odds with his surroundings and reading the signs of nature