Jack London's How To Build A Fire

The average low temperature in the Yukon is negative sixty degrees below. The average human can die when his or her core temperatures drop to seventy degrees or lower. In the short story, “How to Build A Fire” by Jack London, a man and a dog must make it to camp in hostile conditions. Jack London, a master writer of brutal realism uses many literary devices such as characterization, atmosphere, tone and setting to create a frigid, hostile wasteland that seems to have a taste for blood. Jack London also portrays characters in a realistic manner, examining them, showing all parts of them, showcasing their Narcissism, desperation, and vulnerability. Throughout the story, Jack London uses characterization quite often to compare and contrast

From the beginning of the story the character is in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus seventy-five degrees and occasionally the sun may not rise for multiple days; this man is at odds with his setting. The very place the character is in is what destroys him, it's the very thing that takes away the most valuable thing the man has, his life. Jack London uses his style to make this idea of man versus nature much more real, he paints the setting in a way that shows a true beast of a setting that is the tundra of the Klondike. While the character doesn't have enough awareness of his surrounding, the author uses his style to demonstrate how frigid and relentless the setting is through the eyes of the narrator, using a form of writing called realism. Realism is “the quality or fact of representing a person, thing, or situation accurately or in a way that is true to life.” (Dictionary.com). Jack London is very skilled in representing characters as real people or things and not making them feel like characters, therefore the story becomes much more relatable and harsh because the literature becomes seemingly