American Literature - Essay Example

The other story, “To build a fire” by Jack London is about a newcomer who is experiencing the first winters of town by going on a journey in a weather fifty degrees below zero while ignoring various warnings of his elders and other members of the community. He was well aware of the various repercussions of this journey but paid no heed to it. He was unwilling to accept the various limitations of all the human beings; the fact that humans can only survive a particular level of heat or cold.

There are a number of similarities and differences in both of these stories but the main concept in both is naturalism. Naturalism is a concept that individuals have little or no influence over their lives. Their lives are controlled by the forces of nature in their environment or surroundings. One of the similarities of these stories is that both show cases of extreme weather conditions. In the open boat, all the four survivors have to work together to fight the rough waves in order to save their lives while in the other story, the man has to endure the extreme snow conditions in order to reach to his desired place.

Both of these stories show that human beings do not have the necessary power to compete with nature and cannot change the outcome as decided by the forces of nature. . The author, Stephen Crane tries to portray the little power that all of us have against the nature and how little we could do but he believes that no matter what the situation is we should never lose hope and do everything we can using the limited resources we have with us. Similarly, in the story “To build a fire”, the author Jack London shows the difficulties the traveler had to face due to the extreme weather conditions and how it affected the traveler by creating problems for him.

The basic message both these authors tried to portray was that all human beings have little control over their lives and how we should pay attention to the warnings given to us by our surroundings by understanding the limitations imposed upon us by the nature. The power of nature was also shown by these authors as in both the stories one character each was killed or taken from the world by the nature; the sailor in “The Open Boat” and the traveler who was the main character in the story “To build a fire”.

The biggest difference in both these stories is that the characters in the open boat had a conflict with the nature as well as a conflict between themselves as they were trying hard to work together in such extreme conditions. On the other hand, in the story to build a fire, Jack London tries to show a conflict between man and the nature as the traveler was trying to respond to the challenges being thrown into his way by the nature by continuing the journey instead of accepting his defeat. He had to face these challenges in the form of extreme weather conditions only through his own mistakes and options whereas the four characters in the second story were