In Jack London’s To Build Fire, the main character struggles with nature on account of his removal from it by reason. The man confronts the bitter cold of the near Arctic and is unable to survive. This is because he is a human being and human beings have evolved reason which trumps natural survival instinct.  Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.” Man is removed from nature and the ability to survive it because he can reason and decide against his own instincts. Man’s removal from nature on account of this is a detriment to the specific man in the story because it does not enable him to survive. The dog, the symbol for unreasoning creatures, survives because it knows how and trusts that instinct.
        The man goes out into the wilderness in temperatures below 50 degrees below. He has been forewarned that this will be difficult, but has gone out against the better judgment of his comrades. This is the first step the man takes against the natural process. The dog “knew that it was no time for traveling” (121). This dog would not have gone out into the cold had he not been the man’s companion. He defies nature again by not supplementing his own natural functions with the chin strap he does not wear. If Man had not developed reason, nature might have evolved men in this region to have better insulation and other attributes which would enable it to survive the cold. The Man uses reason to first go into the cold wild and then unsuccessfully to survive it.
        The cold begins to defeat the Man’s reason. His mental capabilities begin to slow and he forgets his own precarious position. First the shock of the sudden breakthrough startles him enough to build a fire where it will not burn. Then he begins to forget his own physical limitations. When his second fire is also unsuccessful, the Man thinks of killing the dog for its warmth. While the mere fact that he should have to rely upon such a horrendous thing as killing his only companion to survive is telling enough, it further demonstrates the effect of the cold that the man is still unable to kill the dog because he is physically unable to do so.  It is like the Donner Party who were forced to rely on murder for their own survival just as the man contemplates. He does not remember that he is so incapacitated and “experienced genuine surprise when he discovered his hands could not clutch” because “he had forgotten for a moment that they were frozen” (127). The cold and shock of Nature’s most recent blow have decreased both his mental and physical capacity to reason and thus perhaps survive. It could be reasoned that had the man first built the fire where it would not be destroyed, then his feet would have dried and he would have calmly walked along thinking of logical things until he reached the camp. This would be an altogether different story and since it is not the one which London wrote, it can be reasoned that this one specific instance of the defeat of reason by Nature is the pivotal moment upon which the rest of the story hangs. London wants to show that Nature prevails over Reason.
        The man relies upon the dog for the primal instincts which the latter has and the former lacks. The man understands that his life is more important than the dog’s. For this reason, he sends the dog out on the uncertain ice before him. The dog knows instinctively that the ice will break, so he balks against going. When he falls through the ice, the dog knows what to do to stay warm, which is to bite the ice off of its paws. The dog “obeyed the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its being” (122). When the man falls though, he must rely upon building a fire to survive. Everything the man does he has been told to do on the advice of someone else because, “the old-timer on Sulphur Creek had told him about it the previous fall” (124). He builds his fire, thinking himself safe then. He even doubts the instruction of the one whose advice he took, “those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he though” (124). Then, though, his fire is destroyed by nature.  As soon as this occurs he rescinds his thoughts about those old –timers with, “perhaps that old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right” (125). Because of the lack of ancestral and instinctive knowledge, the man has the choice to decide whether to follow the advice. Just before the man dies his last conscious thought is of this old man who gave him the advice that could have saved his life. He sees the man “warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe” (129). This clearly is where the man would like to be, far far away from the fatal cold and his own blistering failure.  All that is left is the dog, watching the man slip off into sleepy death. The dog has its own nature to rely upon and so he survives, looking for someone else with fire.
        This process of inherited knowledge aids the dog in his survival. The man has no such accumulated knowledge. Civilization and communication have enabled men to pass their knowledge to one another, but nothing dictates that they must use it. They may go against what would help them survive and do what would not help them. Reason allows them to have free will and decide what to do. This is as much a detriment in the wild as it is a boon. If humans had retained ancestral knowledge, the man might have been able to survive. His ability to reason and decide for himself what to do only hinders him in a struggle against nature.  London tells us, “The man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold” (123). The author is underlining and emphasizing that the man is not well fit for this environment. Coorlantartica.com says that, “The lowest temperature that can be endured is a combination of the duration and the extent of the exposure, so it is not easily determined. A naked person will start to feel cold if the surrounding temperature drops below around 25°C (77°F). Physiological responses such as shivering and diverting blood away from the extremities and surface of the skin will then kick in” (see works cited). So it is evident that the man is out of his element. The dog is not out of his element as “the dog knew, all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (123). This collective consciousness of ancestral knowledge separates men from beasts. Instead of this ancestral knowledge, men have logic and reason and deductive paragraphs. Yet in these circumstances, it is not for the good of man that reason has been invented. When all hope is already lost, having reason only serves to panic the man. He thinks of dying. He thinks of his limbs extending but “he tried to keep this thought down, to forget it, to think of something else; he was aware of the panicky feeling it caused, and he was afraid of the panic” (128). He is aware of his own immanent death.
        Even into death, logic is firmly in the men of minds. Of all creatures are only humans truly aware when death comes? The dog does not know the man is dead; he does not have reason to understand the sequence of events. He must creep very close and sniff to determine that death has claimed the man. He scurries away, alive, searching for new companions to keep him warm and fed. The beast is one who survives because of extinct and the store of ancestral knowledge. For all of philosophy’s emphasis on reason and logic putting men above beasts, Jack London shows his readers that in the wilderness, wildness defeats reason.












Works Cited

http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/cold_humans.h    tm. “Tropical Animals”. 2001. Ward, Paul.