In the story "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, there is one principal theme; respecting nature and having a powerful understanding of the warning signs it gives a person. This theme is shown through the character and his actions. The main character in the story had an attitude that prevented him from heeding internal and external warnings that Mother Nature had been sending him from the beginning. He did not respect nature's power, and most definitely paid the ultimate price for it.

His attitude was arrogant and careless. The man had no real experience in the harsh realms of the deadly cold Yukon. He only understood facts and never had had any "hands on" encounters with what "being cold" really meant. He knew it was very cold and his body was numb, but he failed to realize the danger that this posed to his extremities. He was just a newcomer with no experience, who thought that what he had heard from the old man in Sulphur Creek was just an exaggeration of the truth.

But there were plenty of warning signs that what he was about to encounter was very perilous to the human body, yet neither the "absence of sun from the sky," (101) nor "the tremendous cold"

(101) made any effect on him. The temperature was far less than fifty degrees below, but he did not care about how much colder it was. He thought that they were just numbers. He did not think of his "frailty as a creature of temperature."

The story's theme effectively shows that failure to heed warnings will lead to adverse repercussions. In the main character's case, it led to his cold death.

The man should have known that Mother Nature had already implanted the knowledge of the wilderness into the brain of one of her creatures. Yet he keeps walking with foolish self assurance.

London writes that "most men who knew the cold respected it and knew that it could trick and kill a person." Yet the man in the story was new to the area:

The dog was certainly one factor that should have led the man to believe that the weather was far to horrendous to be traveling in. He should have sent many warning signals to the man. London describes him by saying:

The strangeness and weirdness of it all-made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new comer in the land, a Cheechako and this was his first winter. (101)

It is not until the end of the story that the man believes he should have listened to the warnings of both Mother Nature and the old man. When the fire gets smo

Some common words found in the essay are:
Mother Nature, Mother Nature's, Sulphur Creek, Jack London, mother nature, Build Fire, warning signs, build fire, warnings mother nature, below zero, sulphur creek, trail mate, tremendous cold, external warnings, cold travelling, warnings mother,
Approximate Word count = 897
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)