Kimball Khetani

Fitz English 8

December 16, 2018

Literary Analysis Paragraph

Literary Analysis Paragraph

To Build A Fire

        Everybody has instincts, sometimes animals more than humans. In the short story, To Build a Fire, by Jack London, a man and a dog set out in the cold forrest trying to survive the seventy-five below zero degree weather. The man and the dog have to use there instincts on whether they should keep going onward or stop to warm up. The dog always has better instincts and knows that it is too cold to keep going but the man keeps going forward. The man gets up out of his bed at the campsite and is sure that he will get to his boys by noon. The dog is already up and he can tell that it is really cold. The man gets dressed and gets his stuff ready and starts walking. The man was so cold yesterday that he doesn’t even know that it is colder today. The dog on the other hand can tell the difference in whether with his instincts.

 “This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.”

        Instinct is so important in the story. If you don’t have any instinct, then you will not know when it is to cold or not, you will not know when to warm up. And if your whole body is numb you will not be able to tell it because you wouldn’t be able to test if you could feel your body. Instinct play a huge role in this story because the dog knows when to stop and rest and the man doesn’t. The man ends up dying to the cold but the dog does not. The dog had an instinct that told him that he should rest and warm up. The man died because he didn’t have any instinct and the dog had instinct so he rested a lot but still kept going when he knew that path was clear.