Reflection- "To Build A Fire"

For this reflection, we were supposed to read "To Build a Fire" by Jack London.  I just want to start off by saying reading this passage made me feel very cold.  That actually may be a good thing, because that means that Jack London was using a lot of good imagery and descriptions to make the reader literally feel what is going on.  It could just be cold in this room, but I thought it would make that point.  The story takes place in the Yukon,  and it is about a man and his dog who are traveling through the snow.  It is extremely cold--an amazing seventy-five degrees before zero (Glencoe Literature).  It is so cold, in fact, that the breath of both the animal and the man are literally freezing to their faces.  The man is also chewing tobacco, and this nasty spit is freezing onto his beard.  The man at first comes off as optimistic about the journey, believing that everything is okay and he will soon make it out of the extreme cold in no time.  I think he was just trying to self-motivate himself because pretty soon, he realizes he needs to start a fire and get warm if he really wants to survive.  The rest of this story makes me really sad.  The man tries his best to start a fire because he knows it will save him, but he can not keep the flame going.  "The experience was a fear such as he had never known in his life" (Glencoe Literature).  In the end, the man can never get the fire he needs going and he ends up dying.  Is that not such a horrible ending?  Jack London was a naturalist though, meaning he wrote a lot about nature and a person's relationship with nature.  This is very similar to the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Both of these writers were transcendentalists and naturalists, and they sought solitude in nature to achieve the life they believed people needed to live.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. Glencoe Literature. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.