Humans and the Environment

Paper Summary:

Many times in writing, writers use simple relationships between humans and the environment to show a deeper, more general theme, such as survival or equality. This paper examines how Sara Orne Jewett's "A White Heron," Stephen Crane's "Open Boat," Jack London's "To Build A Fire," and Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine," all deal with humans interacting with their environments as a tool to show their ideas or to teach a lesson. It also looks at how, although each of these stories has significant thematic differences and plots, all four have a fair share of similarities.

From the Paper:

"The two poems that have the most in common thematically are London's "To Build a Fire," and Crane's "Open Boat." Both stories use a relationship between humans and the environment to represent the strength of nature and survival (Prof. Rubenfeld, HLI 118, Spring 2005). In London's story, a man who is traveling in the Yukon, where the temperature is 75 degrees below zero, to go meet a group of his friends. Instead of going with a group of people and taking the main trail, which is safer and more practical, the man goes off with just a dog and takes a less traveled path (London, "To Build a Fire,"). He manages fairly well with the cold, building a few fires on the way to keep warm, until he falls into a water spring. It is so cold that if he doesn't build another fire he will face certain death, so he attempts to build one, only to build it under a snow covered tree."

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