Jack London’s Worldview Through the Lens of “To Build a Fire”

To Build a Fire by Jack London

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Born in 1876 as a bastard child to an unmarried mother and absent father, John Griffith Chaney would quickly overcome the strange circumstances of his youth to become one of the premier naturalistic writers of the early 20th century. Before his first birthday, his mother married John London, the stepfather responsible for John Griffith Chaney being renamed to Jack London. London was largely self-taught and took great pride in his prowess with reading and writing. He frequented libraries and claimed to always have had the ability to read and write. From the very beginning of his life, Jack London was a bold adventurer. It is likely that he had more worldly experiences during his teenage years than do most people in their entire lives. Some of his adventures include sailing across the Pacific Ocean, participating in anti-government protests, briefly attending college, and panning for gold. In his twenties, Jack London filed the gap left behind by the death of Stephen Crane, and he joined the ranks of the successful naturalist writers of the time. His writing is profound, simplistic yet deeply emotional, and as naturalistic as any writer who ever crafted a story. Certainly, a highlight of his career is the short story titled To Build a Fire – a tale of man versus himself, nature, dogs, and death. In this story, London’s worldview is on full display, as is his vast experience as a world traveler. Unfortunately, London’s writing lacks a Christian worldview. Perhaps it was the difficult youth he experienced living alongside his unstable, spiritualist mother which convinced him to avoid religion or faith altogether. Despite this, London’s worldview does overlap with aspects of the Christian worldview, but probably not in an intentional sense. Interestingly, although the genre is labeled naturalistic, the key to being a successful naturalistic writer seems to be an advanced level of experience dealing with and talking to a wide variety of people. Jack London is no exception to this. At the core of his story To Build a Fire, the narrator is enveloped in a beautifully naturalistic milieu, but it is his interactions with his dog, the man who warned him not to go out in the snow, his awaiting friends, as well as his own thoughts, which give the story depth and meaning beyond the naturalistic scene. Through daring adventures, Jack London developed a deep well of information about human behavior which helped to propel his writing career towards success.

Jack London became legendary for writing from the perspective of animals, specifically dogs. Arguably his most famous work, Call of the Wild is a novel about a dog named Buck who is stolen away from his comfortable life of luxury and thrust into a violent world of brutality and survival. This novel has obvious similarities to the story To Build a Fire, and perhaps it was this story which inspired London to write a full-length novel in the same vein. In To Build a Fire, the poor decisions of the narrator are silently questioned by his dog, although the narrator seems to be oblivious of the dog’s suffering as well as superior instincts. It is only when the narrator attempts to kill the dog for survival purposes does he realize that the dog is of a superior intelligence. This approach works well because the narrator need not describe his own flaws and failures to the reader – the dog serves the role of informant. Conversely, Call of the Wild is narrated by Buck, a dog, and despite being a naturalistic story, London’s ability to uniquely portray characters is lost. London’s advantage as a writer is his adventurous spirit and worldly experience, but this is lost in Call of the Wild. This is not to say that Call of the Wild is a poor novel – it isn’t – but it does lack the human connection and relatability of To Build a Fire. It is interesting and ironic that London’s most famous novel deviates from his strength with experiencing people all over the world. The problem with his most famous novel, Call of the Wild, is that by allowing a dog to narrate the book from the first-person limited view, London essentially created a naturalistic science fiction story instead of the naturalistic, survival, hero’s journey, overcoming the odds sort of novel which it is branded as today. The novel does fit within these tropes, but using a dog as a narrator is highly subjective and existential – so existential, in fact, that accomplished and advanced readers may find Call of the Wild to be a frustrating reading experience that is extremely suspect and untrustworthy. When compared with To Build a Fire, the existential nature of Call of the Wild ruins the naturalistic milieu and causes a boring reading experience.

One of London’s notable adventures was his 1908 voyage to the Solomon Islands and the greater Melanesia region. Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The Melanesia region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea, as well as many smaller islands and territories. London “placed his life and those of his crew at risk of imminent death when he voyaged to the Solomon Islands in 1908, a region he believed to be filled with cannibals and headhunters” (Newlin). Some scholars believe that this voyage was rooted in racism or some sort of disdain for natives, but these claims are unfounded, and no evidence of racism is apparent in London’s writing. The truth is that London was simply interested in learning as much as he possibly could about people, and this curiosity and fascination extended to native and aboriginal groups. “Based on archival sources, the books London had read to prepare himself for the voyage, and recent ethno-history of the region, this article argues that London's voyage did not occasion a more enlightened view of race, as some recent scholars have argued; indeed, his months in the Solomon Islands confirmed the racialist cast of his thinking. London undertook his journey into a region he perceived as dangerous as part of a sense of adventure that depended on demonstrating courage and manliness, and in the process he acted as a metaphoric headhunter himself” (Newlin). This is a disgusting and untrue assessment of London’s time in Melanesia. It is clear that London’s intent was discovery and enlightenment, not destruction or racism. Investigating racial differences is very different from being a racist, as the former is stepped in academia and the latter in hatred.

In a separate article, Keith Newlin seems to be making the opposite argument that he made in the previous article. In this article, Newlin is reveling in London’s ability to shed light on the faults of western colonizers. “Any reader of Mauki shudders at London’s description of the trader Max Bunster, who has beaten two native wives into early graves, relentlessly torments his workers, and takes a particular delight in donning a mitten made of a ray’s rasp-like skin to scrape the hide off Mauki’s back. The story was written in October 1908 while London was cruising the Solomon Islands while on his South Seas adventure aboard the Snark. In it, London depicts an indentured laborer’s violent response to a culmination of abuses from a sadistic overseer that culminates in a flaying of the overseer before the taking of his head. As Jeanne Campbell Reesman observes about Mauki, “Though he dwells more upon the savagery of the Melanesians, London also describes the moral degradation of the whites, with their laxity, alcoholism, and racist stupidity” (Newlin).

It is a baffling question of what would incite a journalist to write two articles which are so blatantly opposite and polarizing. Regardless of the motivations of the journalist, what is important to understand is that London’s extensive travels were nothing short of profound, exciting, enlightening, and historically revolutionary. Perhaps some of these adventures are controversial in our contemporary view, but London’s voyages lack a nefarious or evil intent. It is the richness of the cultures of the people London met on his travels which are the basis for his success as a naturalistic writer.

Works Cited

Holy Bible. New Living Translation. Tyndale House Publishers. 2015.

London, Jack. The Call of the Wild. Barnes and Noble Classics. 2003

London, Jack. To Build a Fire. The American Tradition in Literature. McGraw-Hill Education.

2019. Page 396.

Newlin, Keith. Among Cannibals and Headhunters: Jack London in Melanesia. Journeys,

vol. 19, no. 1, June 2018, pp. 1+. Gale Literature Resource Center,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549157730/Lit....

Accessed 8 May 2023.

Newlin, Keith. Jack London’s “Mauki” and the Colonial Pacific. American Literary Realism,

vol. 54 no. 3, 2022, p. 255-274. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/851909.

Perkins/Perkins. Jack London. The American Tradition in Literature. McGraw-Hill Education.

2019. Page 394.



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