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Strength In Ernest Hemingway's To Build A Fire

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In the story “To Build a Fire” the protagonist fails to recognize nature strength, almost in a disrespectful manner while traveling in the harsh Yukon environment. The down fall for him not listening and underestimating nature itself led him to his death. In this story you could find irony because he was also warned by a wise old man not travel alone in extreme conditions. The protagonist failed to listen to the old man that was his first mistake. The protagonist got lucky a couple times among his journey and came across many trial and errors, but the character’s luck started to run out. Once he recognizes his strength alone wouldn’t get the job done, he instantly realizes it was over and eventually died in the cold Yukon trail. No human …show more content…

“He knew that a fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below how much colder he did not know. But the temperature did not matter” (111). Under normal circumstance spit does not freeze in the air nor does on the ground. Since it did both that tells us as peers, he is in a dangerous environment where he shouldn’t travel alone. Since the protagonist subconscious mind fails to get an understanding how easy it is to freeze to death in the conditions he is in. He continues to go further down his menacing path to failure.
Due to his lack of imagination, the character will not recognize how much of a threat nature will be as he dig deeper down his path. Since he fails at recognizing the strength of nature almost in a disrespectful manner, its treacherous force will soon hit him hard. The author hilfer, Anthony channel states an issue on environmental situations that relates his story blowback to London with the topic view of nature and the wild. He states that humans should have more respect for the wild because it’s Mother Nature. Mother Nature is very unpredictable and cannot be stopped by human

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Chris McCandless was a peculiar young man who explored the wilderness of Alaska. Many people would consider him courageous as he died doing what he loved, on the other hand some feel he was foolish and unprepared. Inspired by literature and seeking escape from his rocky relationship with his family, Chris wanted to live off the land in the cold Alaskan winter. Jon Krakauer explores what led to McCandless’s death and explains the actions that led him into the wild. In my opinion, Chris seemed more foolish than courageous, since he was escaping his problems back home and was highly unprepared for what he was tackling.

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At the end of the story though the main characters instincts are not strong enough and that is what ends up killing him. In reality he is unaware of the many things waiting ahead for him in that freezing forest. An elder man tried to tell him that it is dangerous to go alone

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In Greg Peterson’s, view, a renowned environmentalist "Our downfall as a species is that we are arrogant enough to think that we can control Mother Nature and stupid enough to think it is our job.” But we as humans ignore that fact, we ignored it for centuries and we still do. In Tangerine, we see that that idea is perfectly woven into the story. In Tangerine, most people are not affluent and the land there had gone through many stages of development that worsens the rift between man and nature but yet they have an uneasy balance with nature. One that may not last.

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The character, Neal, does not grasp nor understand the power that nature has, and do to his own stupidity nature leaves her mark, giving him an excruciating sunburn. Neal only wanted to use nature for his own selfish benefit, instead of learning from it and acknowledging nature’s power and strength. By contrast, Paul, son of the preacher, acknowledged the power of nature and was attuned to the natural world and respectful of the waters and mountains of Montana. Yet, Paul could not escape his own frailty and his life was taken from him prematurely. Paul’s death is significant in that it reminds others that life can be quickly snuffed out, but the waters of the rivers in Montana will not be so quickly eradicated.

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The coldness outside reinforces the cold his wife puts off and the lack of new beginnings around him.

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To Build a Fire” and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. The settings in these stories, the Yukon in “To Build a Fire” and an island in the south Atlantic in “The Most Dangerous Game”, take a toll on the main characters in a very different fashion. Both of these short stories provide excellent demonstrations of this topic but the most obvious are the environment The Man is in, the, application of nature in Rainsford’s survival, Connells animal-like description of Rainsford, and the symbol of fire. We see in “To Build a Fire” that The Man is constantly plagued by the icy tundra he finds himself in.

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In the passage To build a fire the character goal is to get to the campsite where all his friends will be waiting for him to arrive but he never makes it because of the low temperatures he faces many circumstances that slow him down. He struggles with fires when he runs out of matches and he starts to have problems with his body when factors of his body is numbed, his dog can feel that it is not good to continue going in the cold weather but his owner insist to stay and they continue to walk in the snow. The character can not go on anymore and dies out in the middle of nowhere. In conclusion, the moral of the story is even if you have people who give you advice but do not take it sometimes you have to rely on what people tell you.

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The author continuously repeats how cold the temperature is, painting a picture of a kind of loneliness and cruel (surrounding conditions). He also relates the man 's state of being along the mood of the story. "He was not much given to thinking. " He had only mind to reaching his goal and not much thought about the temperature. "

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