Just reading Jack London's To Build A Fire made me cold! Also a little depressed. It was such a sad story. I remember thinking at the beginning of the piece that this probably isn't going to end well. And then the man started getting a little overconfident in his ability to stay alive - that's when I knew he was going to die. Although there were only two characters in the story (and one of them was a dog), I really enjoyed London's style of writing. As a reader, I found it very easy to comprehend and follow unlike Crane's The Open Boat piece. Surprisingly, I found To Build a Fire similar to Dreiser's Sister Carrie in that both main characters made repeatedly dumb choices. Although London's main guy was overconfident and Sister Carrie was innocently naive, these characters strangely reminded me of each other.
I also really liked the way London contrasted the man's human intelligence with the dog's natural instinct. I thought it was a very creative and subtle way to show that although humans may have more intelligence, sometimes our "smartness" gets in the way. When we start to become overconfident in our knowledge, we often end up looking dumb and having to pay for it - like dying while traveling on foot in Alaska without a partner.
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