The modern fireplace is a marvel of invisible technology, a contained conflagration triggered by the simple flip of a switch and without human error or intervention. Only recently, and in the comforts of home, has lighting a fire become so simple. As the title suggests, Jack London's 1908 short story contains in its narrative a literal set of sequential directions on how to "start a fire." London extends this sequential conceit to his fateful vision of the universe. Unlike the dog in the story, who can rely on his purebred arctic instinct as he navigates the treacherous tundra, the anonymous man possesses a duller, more short-sighted instinct that is unable to predict the consequences of the environment. This instinctive flaw in humanity (compared to that of a husky) is a fact, but man fails to compensate by integrating intellectuality into his journey. If he used all his resources efficiently, as the dog does, man could anticipate the chain of events leading to his death, and thus alter its literal and figurative course. Such a deconstruction of a preordained universe is possible, London suggests, because the reader is made aware—through parallelism, word choice, and other stylistic and suspenseful devices—of the subtle ways in which seemingly disconnected events are causally connected. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay London pushes you to investigate the reasons for the connection in the first two sentences creating a panorama of connections, levels and progression: The day was broken cold and grey, extremely cold and grey, when the man strayed from the main path of the Yukon and went up the high land bank, where a dark and little-traveled path led eastward through the thick spruce forest. It was a steep bank, and he stopped to catch his breath at the top, apologizing to himself for the act as he looked at his watch. (462)The care London takes to produce a subjunctive atmosphere is delicate but insistent. The adverbial and prepositional clauses - "when the man walked away from", "where a dark", "through the fat spruce forest" - create a solid and moving image in the reader's mind of the man's progression on a metaphorical ladder extending horizontally. as much as vertically. The modifying adverb “excessively” also alters the first bleak “The day was cold and gray,” suggesting to the reader the likelihood that the temperature will worsen throughout the story (or at least man's reaction to it). Throughout history man can only repeat to himself "It was certainly cold", adding confidence to his current observation rather than making predictions in the way he does "overly". London further exploits this staged moment to expose the man's status as an obstacle to the environmental chain, an unanchored participant who begins the story in stasis and will end up in the same position. At high altitude (verticality will play an important role later), the man "stops" to check the time. Rather than continuing to merge with the fluid environment, its only definition of progression is temporal, technological, and not geographic. Seeing the world in numerical terms—the narrator, or the man, later measures the invisible “dark hair line” of the main trail in mileage to various checkpoints—rather than in spatial terms foreshadows his literal downfall. The man looks "back along the road he came from" instead of looking forward along his path, and the description of the terrain puns "no impression on the man", as few warning signs do in thestory: "The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice jams had formed of the frost" (462). The causal relationship between the layers will become crucial later in this story, and for the man to see only the "pure white" surface and not the suspicion that a threat lurks beneath is cleverly summed up by London when he describes the man's next step : "He dived among the great spruces" (463). What prevents man from seeing beyond the surface and refraining from such a bold plunge is explicitly described by London at the beginning: He was quick and careful in the things of life, but only in things, and not in meanings. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd frosts. This fact struck him as a sense of great unease, and that was all. This did not lead him to meditate on his fragility in general, capable of living only within narrow limits of heat and cold; and from then on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. (463) One of the main obsessions of Naturalism, that of processes, of omniscient descriptions of how water flows from a tank to a tap to a sewer, of how meat turns into food and is digested through the body, is immaterial to humans. He is unwilling to engage his predictive intellect, even when the evidence invites analysis of the processes: "The man's red beard and mustache were also frosted, but more solidly, the deposit took the form of ice and increased with each breath hot and humid exhaling" (464). Man refuses to consider consequentiality, even when his future is threatened by accidents: "And all the time, in his consciousness, there was the knowledge that every moment his feet were freezing. This thought tended to make him panicked, but he fought against it and kept calm” (472). Compare this description with the pessimistic scenario he struggles against as he runs shortly before his death: “…and that he would soon become stiff and dead. This thought kept him in the background and he refused to consider it. At times he pushed forward and demanded to be heard, but he brushed it aside and forced himself to think of something else” (476). At this point all anticipation is fatalistic, so the man's thoughts about the present are reasonable. But during his previous attempts to revive himself, he is unable to use future plans in cahoots with present action: "He put the thought of his frozen feet, nose and cheeks out of his mind, dedicating his whole soul to the matches." (472). The mind-body connection is further disrupted once the subject actually loses the use of their hands, making the natural selection advantage of opposable thumbs questionable. Instead of an instinctive communication between his brain and his body, man must compensate with sight: The dead fingers could neither touch nor grasp... He observed, using the sense of sight instead of that of touch, and when he saw with his fingers the sides of the bunch, he closed them, that is, he wanted to close them, because the threads were lowered and the fingers did not obey. (472)This move away from a bodily position towards its environment gives man the first glimmers of imagination and creativity. He finds it "curious that one should use one's eyes to find out where his hands were" (475). This curiosity extends to the fact that "he could run with his feet so frozen that he could not feel them when they hit the ground and supported the weight of his body" (476). With death now imminent, man is completely detached from any connection with the environment: «He seemed to float on thesurface and to have no connection with the earth" (476). The disappearance of causality between his head and his body and between his body and the earth provokes in man a similar imagination that had hitherto been absent: "Once somewhere he had seen a winged Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when touching the earth" (476). The closer he gets to death, the more he abstracts, completely transporting his mind from his body: "Then the thought came to him that the frozen parts of his body must extend... . the thought asserted itself and persisted, until it produced a vision of his totally frozen body" (476). His initial solipsism, or at least the lack of external gaze, is replaced by the external gaze, the external gaze. As death grips him , he sees himself no longer as a man but as "a chicken with his head cut off - such was the simile that came to mind" (477) His final vision of himself comes from joining the boys in the discovery of his corpse : "He no longer belonged to himself, because even then he was beside himself, he was with the boys and looked at himself in the snow" (477) . This premonition comes too late, activated only by the immediate arrival of death and not by its distant call. Even after this inspired vision of detachment, the reader is once again reminded of the static intellect that trapped the man: “It was certainly cold, it was his thinking” (477). But his immobile intellect is only half the equation. Man's dependence on his weak instincts, especially when compared to that of the native husky, plays a similar role in his downfall. Even their physical descriptions show their contrasting states of compatibility with the environment. The man may have a “warm moustache, but facial hair does not protect his high cheekbones and greedy nose that thrusts aggressively into the frigid air” (464). His impudence in attacking nature is counterbalanced by his noble features which are not designed for such a climate. The wolfdog, of course, may be "depressed by the terrible cold," but he is able to tolerate it and, what is more, recognizes that "it was not the time to travel" (464). The difference is made clear by London: "His instinct told him a truer story than that told to man by man's judgment... He felt a vague but threatening apprehension which subdued him... and which made him put himself in avidly questions every unusual movement of man" (464). Apprehension is the natural reaction in such a threatening situation for the animal mind, instinct being based on survival. While man must be told something according to his judgment, the dog does not need any communication, has no bonds that can be broken. It bites the ice from the feet without delay and absolutely without requiring the human invention of fire: "This was a matter of instinct. Letting the ice remain would have meant sore feet. He didn't know. He simply obeyed the mysterious urge that arose from the deep vaults of his being” (466-467). This same hidden instinct prevents the dog from falling into the man's trap to kill him and use his carcass to warm himself:...in his voice there was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal, which had never seen the 'man talk that way long before. Something was wrong, and his suspicious nature sensed danger: he didn't know what danger, but somewhere, somehow, fear for this man arose in his brain. (474)More apprehension. The man's arrogance in venturing into such weather despite the veteran's advice, despite his body's frequent warnings, and despite the first accident (the man scoffs, "Anyone who was a man could travel alone") prevents such useful apprehension (470). But we can.