What is the role of "Naturalism" in "To Build a Fire"?

Naturalism is a great literary movement. It focuses on how nature is essentially unaware of mankind's struggles against nature's dominating presence. If nature is aware, then Naturalism says that nature doesn't care about mankind's efforts. Stephen Crane wrote a wonderful short poem that I think encapsulates Naturalism as a literary movement. The poem is "A Man Said to the Universe."

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Then it turned and ran along the trail toward the camp it knew, where there were the other food providers and fire providers.

The natural setting of the brutal arctic conditions of the Klondike, conditions which are indifferent to the presence of a man, express Naturalism, a literary movement among novelists who viewed people as hapless victims of an immutable and indifferent universe. Naturalism writers portray life exactly as it is, with objectivity and detachment. An example of this is

Naturalism French writer Emile Zola, who described the role of the novelist as that of “a scientist, an analyst, an anatomist” who interprets reality through the application of scientific determinism (eNotes).

Here are elements of Naturalism in "To Build a Fire":

• The protagonist has no name; he is called "the man" in order to make him representative of all people, the rational being in contrast to the dog, who acts upon natural instinct which often serves him better than man's mental powers. Calling him merely "the man" also mitigates the significance of the protagonist.
• Nature is indifferent to the man's plight as he begins to become crippled by frostbite. Since man has no control over nature, the man's poor decision to venture out into the severe temperatures leaves him a victim to this indifference:

the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man....He was a newcomer in the land.

• Lacking the experience of the old man and the instincts of the dog, the man also falls victim to the harshness of the Yukon. His causal attitude about his initial frostbite is clearly a mistake. Because he is incapable of shaping his own destiny, he is vulnerable to the elements in a deterministic manner that typifies Naturalism.
• The frigid environment has reduced the man to an animal, but he cannot survive because he is not adapted to this environment as the furry dog is.
• As part of nature, the dog instinctively knows not to step where there is water beneath the snow. When the man nears the water, it runs from the man, realizing the danger. Later, when he catches the scent of death, the dog returns to camp, abandoning the man.
• Symbols and details are used in Naturalism. For instance, the snow, ice, and severe cold are symbolic of the implacable Arctic. Great attention is given to realistic details in this story; for instance, the man is described quite thoroughly and factually.

What is naturalism and how is it represented in Jack London's "To Build a Fire"?

Naturalism is often defined as a type of realism that emphasizes the harsher and more brutal aspects of daily life. In Jack London's Yukon stories, and in his fiction in general, we see a raw, unfiltered picture of nature and of men and animals who attempt to survive in a state of nature, using both their mental and physical strength in a desperate struggle. "To Build a Fire" pits man against the frozen world of the "Northland" as well as against animals. It's the man's life finally pitted against that of the dog that is crucial; the dog has been the man's servant and companion but rebels when the man tries to kill it in order to preserve his own life. The dog survives and the man perishes in the wilderness of the north.

Though this is as harshly brutal and realistic as a story can get, it differs from the iconic examples of naturalism we normally think of, such as the novels of Emile Zola and Stephen Crane, for two main reasons, in my view.

First, it is an adventure story. There is something romantically extravagant in London's tales that is the antithesis of the man-made world of, say, the New York working-class setting in Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In naturalism, the subjects are usually average, unremarkable people—a cross section of humanity containing victims of a starkly unforgiving milieu.

Second, what we generally regard as naturalistic in literature focuses upon the everyday, but often sordid, interactions among human beings. Zola's Nana deals with a Parisian actress who is also a courtesan: a sex worker with a wealthy and well connected clientele. The men who surround her are obnoxious, selfish, and predatory. In La Bête humaine (The Human Beast, often translated The Beast Within), Zola depicts physical abuse against women and sexual desires that are out of control and lead to murder. London deals less with human interaction than other naturalistic writers and relies much more on the thematic connections among man, animals, and nature—as well as the contrast between "civilized" and "natural"—to propel his fiction. It is naturalism in which people are not merely shown in brutal and violent situations, but are forced to take on the characteristics of our remote ancestors of prehistory, in their quest for survival.

"To Build a Fire" is naturalistic in that it looks at the story's protagonist in much the same way as a scientist would observe microbes in a petri dish. We observe the unnamed man from a distance as if we're participating in some kind of scientific experiment, an experiment designed to determine the effects of a cold, wintry climate on human behavior.

As the word "naturalistic" implies that the emphasis of literary works written in this style is very much on nature. Inevitably, this means that there's a quasi-scientific objectivity to the writing. Man isn't portrayed in such works as standing apart from nature but as an intrinsic part of it. This means that characters, such as the man in "To Build a Fire," are presented more as objects of study than recognizably human figures with whom we can readily identify.

As a consequence, we gain, or should gain, a greater respect for the forces of nature than the man displayed in foolishly embarking upon such a hazardous journey in the midst of such treacherous conditions. At the same time, we also gain a greater understanding of the right relationship between humanity and nature, the better to maintain an appropriate balance between the two.

In the literary school known as naturalism, nature is a merciless force that defeats the human will at every turn. Instead of being glorified, as nature was in the Romantic movement, nature is harsh and inimical in literary naturalism. 

In "To Build a Fire," nature is a cruel force. There is no sun shining in the Yukon where the story takes place, and there is nothing to temper the ice and cold of the landscape. When the nameless man who is at the center of the story builds a fire, nature defeats him when a load of snow from the spruce tree above lands on the fire and extinguishes it. He then drops the rest of his matches in the snow, extinguishing his chance to survive. The dog who is accompanying the man merely trots off after the man has frozen to death, showing that the man's death did not affect him in the slightest. In this tale, nature is an unpitying force that defeats humans. 

Jack London often employed a naturalistic approach in his writing. “To Build a Fire” falls into this category.  Naturalism bases its theory on scientific laws.  The naturalistic writer focuses on the idea that nature is indifferent to man. 

One of the main characteristics is concentration on narrative rather than emphasizing character. Usually in naturalistic stories, the characters are unnamed and are from the lower to middle classes.  The language centers on the plot.

To the naturalist, man succumbs to nature because he has no control over it. Nature is indifferent to man’s plight. There are aspects of nature that are not meant for man.  Man is in charge of his own behavior; and, if warned, he should not engage in a battle with the unresponsive natural world. Man receives facts about nature; then, he should base his decisions on this information.

In the story, the unnamed man has been warned by the old timer about the severity of the weather.  It is 75 degrees below zero.  He has been told not to travel alone in this kind of weather. Rather than listen to the voice of experience, the newcomer judges that he is able to make it through his personal preparation.

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man.  It was not because he was long used to it.  He was a newcomer in the land...

In addition, the man takes a dog along with him as his companion. Through instinct, the dog knows that the weather is too cold for travel.  One of the primary themes of the story is the difference between man’s thinking and the dog’s instinct. 

Despite the man’s preparation, he makes several mistakes which cause him his life.  Nature does not help or hinder him.  Nature is what it is…the natural world.  If man chooses to battle nature, man will lose because nature will not help him. 

Little is known about the man except that he is new to the Yukon.  From the story, the reader learns that he tries to make preparations---matches, food, tries to watch for hidden springs, runs.

What does he do wrong?

• Goes into the terrible weather alone
• Steps into the spring
• Makes his fire under the tree
• Panics
• Loses his matches
• Runs to regain his circulation but exhausts himself

The man has to change his initial goals of making it to the camp in a certain amount of time-- to keeping from getting frostbite-- to surviving to accepting of death.  The natural world has proven once again that man must be prepared to lose the conflict of man versus nature.

How does Jack London's "To Build a Fire" reflect Transcendentalism?

In this story, nature is much more like an antagonist than anything else, and the protagonist's experience with nature seem to impress upon him "man's frailty in general"; he must guard himself against the extreme cold temperature, and he is not inspired to think on "the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe."

In short, this story does not reflect transcendentalist philosophy. As the man travels, he jumps back from a spot where underground springs could bubble out, causing the ice to thin and creating "traps" where a person could step into three inches of water or fall into three feet of it. He "shied in [...] panic" from these spots. To characterize nature as full of traps goes against transcendentalist philosophy.

For the man to get his feet wet could be deadly due to the cold. Soon, he does break through one of these spots, and he has to stop and build a fire to dry his feet and clothes and shoes so as not to freeze. When this fire begins to work on the snow resting on the branches of the tree above, causing it to fall and douse the flames in an instant, the man feels as if "he had just heard his own sentence of death."

The more time that passes, the more the man becomes alienated from his own body and from the natural environment. He can no longer feel his extremities and must check with his eyes to even be sure that he is touching something or standing upright because he can no longer feel. Rather than putting the man in greater touch with himself, as transcendentalists suppose nature to do, nature has the opposite effect in this story. He seemed "to have no connection with the earth."

In the end, the cold—nature—kills the man. He had tried to rely on himself rather than listening to others' claims about their own experiences, another key transcendentalist philosophy, and his own ideas led him down the path to death.

Transcendentalism had become a major philosophical field of thought during the 1830s, and despite no less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson himself claiming that it had died out by the 1840s, it remained a strong influence on both culture and literature. Jack London's writings show signs of transcendentalist influence, and yet his works were set firmly in the realm of Realism, with little use for idealistic thought and behavior. "To Build a Fire" is especially significant in that it almost directly contradicts the ideas of man transcending animalistic instincts and growing to individual strength on the basis of intellectual and moral growth:

[The cold] did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe... Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
(London, "To Build a Fire," jacklondons.net)

The unnamed protagonist is entirely rooted in The Real; the concepts of Man versus Nature never occur to him, and he makes the mistake of thinking that Nature must be malicious in order to harm him. In fact, it is the coincidental and unthinking aspects of Nature that cause his death. Instead of striving to make himself stronger than his human self by learning about the cold and taking steps to neutralize it, he simply walks into the wild and dies of hypothermia. There is no communion with nature, no epiphany of harmony, and the dog by his side doesn't even stay with him. In every sense, the story is rooted in Realism rather than Transcendentalism, and yet it works to reveal some of the essential flaws in that philosophy: man is not harmonious with Nature, but must be artificially protected from it, and to assume a spiritual or providential "right" to overcome Nature is to be willfully ignorant of natural dangers.

Is "To Build a Fire" an example of naturalism or realism?

"To Build a Fire" is more precisely described as a work of naturalism than one of realism. Realism is literary movement that tries to represent the world as it is, both externally—in terms of plot and setting—and internally. Realistic fiction is especially concerned with the psychology of characters and tries to honestly represent their internal states. Books such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's War and Peace represent the realist movement in nineteenth-century European literature.

Naturalism, on the other hand, is an offshoot of realism. While naturalist narratives also deal with the real world, they are less concerned with the internal state of the characters and instead place them in the larger context of nature. Unlike Realism, where characters struggle with choices they make and the ethical and social repercussions of those choices, in naturalist texts, nature or circumstance act upon the characters. The characters may make choices, but those choices are subordinate to much larger forces that make the individual irrelevant.

"To Build A Fire" is a good example of naturalism. The story is about the awesome power of the cold and how the man's choice to ignore advice and travel alone costs him his life. While the man thinks he knows better, his self-confidence proves to be tragically irrelevant. The story is not concerned with the moral implications of the man's choice. There is little psychological complexity to him, and most of his thoughts are in reaction to his surroundings.

What is a symbol in "To Build a Fire"?

Fire is a repeating symbol in Jack London's short story, "To Build a Fire." Fire, and the successful building of a fire, serves many purposes. Above all, it is a life-sustaining force in the deadly cold climate of the Yukon. It is used for warmth to preserve the human body, since a continuous campfire is necessary for sleeping; otherwise, a man would freeze in the extreme, sub-zero temperatures. Fire is used to cook food, further sustenance for man. It is used for protection against wild animals. But fire's most important use in the story comes as a heat source to thaw frozen clothing. The Chechaquo, the main character in the story, recognizes this importance, and he uses fire for this purpose. In the end, fire also causes the man's demise, melting the snow in the tree and sending it to the earth, where the fire is extinguished. With the death of the fire comes the death of the man.

How does "To Build a Fire" illustrate elements of naturalistic literature?

Jack London's "To Build a Fire" is a product of naturalism or naturalistic thinking in a couple of different ways. 

First, the story perceives human beings as akin to nature, in the sense that human beings are a higher form of animal.  We are not destined to inherit the earth, there is no master plan that guarentees our success, etc.  We are a product of survival of the fittest.  In London's story, however, humans are, in fact, inferior.  We are at the mercy of nature.  The dog is better adapted to survival in the wilderness than the man is, and the dog survives, while the human does not.  Humans are not inherently superior to nature.  There are times and places when and where we are at its mercy.  Biologically, we are not necessarily superior.

Naturalism is, at least in part, an outgrowth or a form of realism.  "To Build a Fire" is very realistic.  The story is gritty and full of detail and the human is presumptuous and overconfident.  But it goes beyond realism to present man vs. nature, and depict man's weaknesses when confronting nature.  The story reveals a human at the mercy of forces he cannot control.  This is an element of naturalism:  realism on steroids, you might say.  This story presents a value judgment about the real or actual.

This particular story doesn't present a human at the mercy of hereditary and social forces.  These forces don't take away the human's free will and show him as a product of determinism, as they do in many naturalistic works.  Instead, nature is the determining force in "To Build a Fire." 

How is "To Build a Fire" an example of naturalism?

Naturalism is a literary movement that follows, somewhat, the example set by literary Realism. Both reject the idealism of the Romantic movement. Naturalism suggests that it is really our environment - nature and/or social forces (e.g. class) – that is the most powerful determinant in human life. In Naturalist literature, Nature is an indifferent force, one that does not care about or concern itself with humans or humanity. There is nothing that looks out for us, no higher power to which we might appeal for assistance or protection; in a Naturalist world, we can only rely on each other.

Certainly, the harshness of the Yukon environment, its “exceedingly cold and grey” horizon, the absence of sun, the “subtle gloom,” and pools hidden under ice-skin and undulations of snow, would indicate that nature does not care at all about the protagonist. It is so cold that his spit freezes in mid-air, and the only way to keep his lunch from freezing is to keep it right up against his body. When he exposes his fingers for more than a minute, a “swift numbness” overtakes them.

The man slips through the ice and wets his feet, and so he must build a fire to dry them. To build the fire, he must remove his mittens, and stop moving, so his body begins to get very cold very quickly. As the fire grows, it loosens the snow from the tree branches above it, and the snow extinguishes his fire. From then, he’s too cold to rekindle the fire, and he knows he has “just heard his own sentence of death.” Nature does not care for his struggles or his pain.

In one last show that Nature does not concern itself with humans, the man’s dog, once he has died, “turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.”

What is the naturalist symbolism in "To Build a Fire"?

Although not based on formal research, to me, the symbolism in "To Build a Fire" exists in the form of the man as  symbolic of humans in general in their attitudes of superiority in respect to most, if not all things.  For example, the man thinks or believes that he has nothing to fear from the weather and that his intelligence makes him far superior to it, when in reality nature is the one thing on earth that man can never and will never be able to change, control, or manipulate.  

Why does the ending of "To Build a Fire" meet the conventions of naturalism?

It would be helpful to begin the answer to this question with a reflection on what Naturalism is. The naturalists were nineteenth-century writers who went beyond realism in an attempt to portray life exactly as it is. Influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and his theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest, the naturalist writers believed that human behaviour is determined by heredity and environment. Relying on new theories in the social sciences, naturalists dissected human behaviour with detachment and objectivity. Naturalism above all presents human beings as subject to natural forces beyond their control.

It is this idea that is central to this short story. The story tells the story of one arrogant man who takes the challenge and struggle that nature presents him with too lightly and underestimates the power and immensity of the forces that nature commands. He dies as a result of this mistake. Nature is shown to be utterly indifferent to human needs and desires and above all that we are subject to natural forces beyond our control. Determinism fits in because the man in the story had an option - he could have chosen to heed the warning of the old timer from Sulfur Creek and not go out when he knew it was so cold, but he chose to arrogantly and presumptuously go out anyway. Determinism would state that therefore in a sense the man wrote his own death sentence.

How does the illustration in "To Build a Fire" reflect the story?

If you are referring to the book cover illustration, I have seen the new cover with the man fighting the bear.  If this is the cover that you mean, I would say the the bear is a symbol of nature and the picture of the man fighting the bear depicts the theme of the book, man vs nature.

In the book, a man goes into the wilderness in frigid cold, unprepared for the challenges he will face as he struggles to survive.  He is contrasted with a dog, who is better prepared to survive because he has instincts that tell him how to weather the terrible cold.  The man is unable to build and sustain a simple fire and therefore, he battles with the forces of nature in the book.

I hope this helps!   

How does the naturalistic movement affect Jack London's "To Build a Fire"?

The literary movement known as naturalism takes a step back from the world and examines human beings from an almost scientific standpoint. This is why, in naturalistic works such as London's "To Build a Fire," the relevant characters are often portrayed like animals engaged in a constant struggle for survival against the odds.

The man in the story is not so much a human as an object of study, an object of scientific curiosity. At no point are we ever allowed to get too near to him; he always remains at an emotional distance from us. This means that we see him as much a part of the frozen Yukon landscape as the snow and the trees.

As the man has been stripped of all his humanity, all that's left is a desperate, Darwinian struggle for existence—a struggle which the man will lose. The overriding message seems to be that we should never forget that we are a part of nature, too: that we should respect it instead of lording over it as if it belongs to us. This may make us somewhat less distinct as a species, but it will also make it easier for us to live in harmony with our natural environment.