The Speculative Nature of Things: “To Build a Fire” and Its Intellectual Narrative.

The present essay aims to provide fresh insights into the intellectual narrative of Jack London’s 1908 best-known story, “To Build a Fire.” Given its least anthropocentric aspects, the story is certainly open to more recent movements than naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly noteworthy among them is the novel movement of speculative realism, which is arguably most relevant to the speculative turn at the outset of the twenty-first century that directs focus toward things, living and nonliving alike. This intellectual movement furnishes an alternative to a certain humanism and its closest cousin, anthropocentrism. Herein lies why this essay makes reference to the speculative realist philosophers, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, who pursue their own approaches beyond humanism in relation to critiquing correlationism between mind and matter- i.e. thinking and being-as embodied by Immanuel Kant. With their explorations of speculative reality in mind, an attempt is thus made to uncover the thought-provoking narrative of “To Build a Fire.” The key figure in this attempt is not the main character but the third-person narrator who offers an omniscient point of view. The focus of this project shifts from numbers to objects: from the temperature degrees that transcend a range of typically human conditions to the snow that allows thinking beyond oneself to the tree that exists outside thought and to the fire that cannot be fully accessible to anyone nor anything. Throughout London’s rewriting of the story, these numbers and objects remain as things in their own right: their own realities are and will continue to be subject to speculation. As the universe of things is of intellectual nature, so is the world of London. If his work is constantly susceptible to intellectual movements, “To Build a Fire” is most illustrative of this very susceptibility. It is, after all, more than an early twentieth-century classic of naturalism. It is an ever-evolving narrative of the speculative nature of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]