How To Use This Discussion Guide

Begin by reading Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” on our site or in your copy of What So Proudly We Hail.

Materials for this guide include background information about the author and discussion questions to enhance your understanding and stimulate conversation about the story. In addition, the guide includes a series of short video discussions about the story, conducted by William Schambra (Hudson Institute) with the editors of the anthology. These seminars help capture the experience of high-level discourse as participants interact and elicit meaning from a classic American text. These videos are meant to raise additional questions and augment discussion, not replace it.

Below is a sample of writing prompts and essay questions for educators, based on Common Core Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies:

• Is the man in “To Build a Fire” recognizably or typically American? After reading the story, write an explanatory essay that addresses the question and analyzes traits that you would consider to be typically American, providing examples to clarify your analysis. What conclusions or implications can you draw? (Informational or Explanatory/Analysis; Task 21) 
• What is, and what should be, our attitude toward the natural world, especially if nature is indifferent to human beings and often hostile to our purposes? After reading “To Build a Fire,” write an essay that addresses the question and support your position with evidence from the text. (Argumentation/Analysis; Task 2) 
• Is the man a hero or a fool?—or something else? What if he had made it back to camp? After reading “To Build a Fire,” write an essay that discusses your view of the man and evaluates the degree to his heroism or foolishness. Be sure to support your position with evidence from the text. (Argumentation/Evaluation; Task 6)

About the Author

Jack London, like the unnamed man in this story, lived on the edge. Born in 1876, he died a short forty years later. As a young man, he was a full-fledged participant in the Yukon Gold Rush of 1897. Like many others at the time, London made the incredibly arduous journey by foot and handcrafted boat from Dyea in Alaska over Chilkoot Pass—a three-quarter-mile forty-five-degree-angled obstacle course—and eventually down the Yukon River into the Northwest Territories. The only gold he brought back, however, was an experience that he would mine for gems of literature for much of his writing life, as evidenced in his well-known novels like Call of the Wild and White Fang, as well as in “To Build a Fire” (1908), all of which draw on the places he saw and the people he met during those hope-filled and brutal times in the Northwestern Yukon territory.

Summary

The story is set in the depth of winter in the Northwest Territories, a place profoundly inhospitable to human beings. The plot is straightforward: On a single, sunless day, an unnamed man undertakes a nine-hour walk along a faint and little-traveled trail in brutally cold weather—75 degrees below zero, 107 degrees of frost. Bound for the mining camp, where his companions are waiting, he takes a roundabout way so that he can scope out the “possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon” (2). Save for the clothes he wears, a watch, his lunch, some chewing tobacco, some matches, and a few pieces of birch bark, he takes precious little with him. He is, however, accompanied by a husky, who seems far more impressed and depressed by—and instinctively aware of—the “tremendous cold” (3). He starts his trek at 9:00 a.m., pauses at 10:00, arrives at his lunch destination at 12:30 p.m.—exactly the time he had set for himself—builds a fire, eats, takes a leisurely smoke, and resumes walking, aiming to make camp by 6:00 p.m. But suddenly, “it happened” (7): he accidentally steps into an icy spring. To dry off, he successfully builds another fire, but he does so under a “fully freighted” tree, whose boughs soon capsize their loads of snow and snuff the fire out (9). Despite the frost that has already affected his fingers, he valiantly attempts to build a third fire, but, alas, he fails. He then makes a couple of attempts to run before deciding to meet death “decently,” “with dignity” (14). He sits down and slips into a frozen sleep, watched over by the increasingly bewildered dog, who eventually wanders off and presumably makes his way back to camp.

Section Overview

Section Overview

Americans have traditionally been known for, and generally proud of, their independence and self-reliance, their freedom and individualism, their enterprising and adventurous spirit, their courage and endurance in grappling with the forces of nature, their success through science and technology in making the world a more hospitable place for human life. These national traits of character, long celebrated in stories of exploration, adventure, the settling of the frontier, and the founding of industries are in fact encouraged by the American creed as it emerges through our founding principles and documents. So, for example, the Declaration of Independence conceives of human beings as free-standing, independent individuals, and it asserts that each of us has an inalienable right to pursue our own happiness, each according to his own lights. The United States Constitution established a large commercial republic, largely in the belief (defended in Federalist 10) that encouragement of material self-interest is far less threatening to stable and free government than is a politics dominated by zeal for high-minded opinion (be it religious, philosophical, or political) or a politics dominated by passionate attachment to charismatic leaders and ambitious men. The Constitution also embraced the goal of progress in natural science and the useful arts by calling for copyright and patent protection for authors and inventors. (Students and readers are encouraged to read these founding documents to better appreciate the questions that follow.) London’s story invites reflection on these features of the American character, with an eye to identifying and assessing their strengths and their weaknesses.