Jack London Figurative Language

875 Words4 Pages

Nickolas Wysong
English 10A
23 February 2023
London Essay

Jack London is an American writer who has written many praises of literature including “The Love of Life” and “To Build a Fire” which show many similarities in how London Writes and how he thinks of nature. In these 2 stories an unnamed man gets stuck in the wilderness, in “The Love of Life” the main character is lost in the Yukon wilderness and in “To Build a Fire” an unnamed man is stuck in cold snowy tundra in the Yukon as well. These 2 stories show that Jack London is a Lucid writer and uses devices like Repetition, Symbolism, and Figurative Language to get to the point he tries to convey in the 2 stories.
Repetition is one of the devices used by London to create a lucid …show more content…

In “The Love of Life", the unnamed man's journey through the wilderness symbolizes the man’s struggle for survival in a hostile world filled with animals ready to kill him like foxes and bears. The unnamed man’s quick loss of physical and mental strength and his eventual dive into madness represents the human event of mortality and just how weak and primal a person is. In "To Build a Fire", the fire could symbolize his burning will to live and when the flames went up in the snow so did his life both continuing to burn, this shows just how lucid a writer London …show more content…

Naturalism is a literary movement that shows people as being at the mercy of nature and the environment they are in and their primalness. In both stories, London shows the struggle of the men through nature's brutality. In "The Love of Life," the unnamed man's struggle for survival in the forsested environment is shown through naturalism “It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food, but that he should be destroyed violently” this shows the man is afraid of nature. The unnamed man is forced to confront the brutality of nature, including hunger, cold, and the threat of predators which is his reason for thinking this. London describes the man’s desperate struggle for survival, showing the man’s primalness and his will to live. Seen in "To Build a Fire," also London portrays the man's futile attempt to survive in the cold of the Yukon. The man is shown as being at the mercy of natures cold “That showed one must not be too sure of things. There was no mistake about it, it was