Student Question
What are the falling action and exposition in "To Build a Fire"?
Quick answer:
In "To Build a Fire," the exposition occurs in the first three paragraphs, describing the setting, weather, and the man's lack of imagination and experience. The falling action happens in the final paragraphs, where the man resigns to his fate, attempts to face death with dignity, and eventually succumbs to the cold, while the dog moves on to find help.
In Jack London's "To Build a Fire," the speaker uses exposition to describe the setting and prepare the reader for what's to come.
The first three paragraphs of the story certainly serve as exposition. The reader learns where the character is (the Yukon, on the Yukon trail); the weather (clear day without any sun and bitter cold); what the man is doing (traveling on foot), etc.
Setting also includes what characters know in a story, and we get an important bit of exposition about what this character knows or doesn't know. I quote from paragraph three:
But...the tremendous cold...made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer....The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees...
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below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general,...
This exposition prepares the reader for the character's eventual trouble.
The falling action of the story occurs in the last two or three paragraphs of the story, once the man has surrendered. By then, he knows he's going to freeze one way or another, so he might as well behave with dignity. He thinks of the old-timer who had warned him, and soon freezes to death. The dog waits as long as he can, then trots off toward the next camp.
What are the exposition, climax, and resolution in "To Build a Fire"?
The exposition of "To Build a Fire" takes place over the first seventeen or so paragraphs, while background information is provided about the protagonist’s experience, as well as facts about the weather and especially the cold and what can happen with the snow drifts and ice skin. The protagonist and his dog proceed through the Yukon relatively safely until the end of the paragraph, when the man falls into the icy water “half-way to the knees.” This incident initiates the rising action.
The action rises, tension growing as he builds his fire, aware of the very real danger of freezing to death. However, he smugly thinks that “he had saved himself” despite an old-timer’s “womanish” advice that no one should travel alone in the Klondike when it is this cold. Rising action continues as snow falls from the tree above and puts out the fire, and he tries to rebuild it. His “dead fingers could neither touch nor clutch.” It occurs to him to kill the dog and warm his hands in the animal’s dead body, but the dog will not come, sensing the danger. The man is too cold to catch it and too weak to kill it anyway.
The story and its conflict reach a climax when the man endures his “last panic”; he has attempted to run to the camp, not realizing that he lacks the endurance to make it. He has screamed at his dog, fallen into the snow, and now comes to see that “he was losing his battle with the frost.” This is the moment of the most tension, just before he determines to meet death “with dignity.”
In the story’s falling action and resolution, the man realizes that he can “sleep off to death” and that there are “worse ways to die.” He imagines the other men finding his body tomorrow, and he drifts off peacefully. His dog watches him until it catches the smell of death and desires to find warmth and food, and then the dog makes its way to the camp alone. Nature has triumphed over humankind.