What is the climax of the story to build a fire?

Answer 1

a conclusion upon fire can be , its a disaster caused by humans as well as by nature . fire can be dangerous but also useful if handled carefully , like in winters fire is one of the majour thing and for sc's it is used for avoiding iscects but these people live in jungle whih can cause a forest fire un-expectidely , so at last i would conclude fire can be usefull but also dangerous if not handled carefully .

Answer 2

Part I

"To Build a Fire" begins at nine o'clock on a winter morning as an unnamed man travels across the Yukon Territory in Northwestern Canada. The man is a chechaquo (cheechako), a Chinook jargon word meaning "newcomer." This is the man's first winter in the Yukon, but because he is "without imagination" and thus unaccustomed to thinking about life and death, he is not afraid of the cold, which he estimates at fifty degrees below zero. He is on his way to join the rest of his companions at an old mining camp on a distant fork of Henderson Creek, and he estimates his arrival time will be six o'clock in the evening. The man is traveling on foot; all he has by way of supplies is his lunch. It is not long before he realizes that the temperature is colder than fifty below, but this fact does not yet worry him.

Part II

The man is accompanied only by a dog - "a big native husky," wilder than other breeds. Despite its heavy fur, the dog dislikes traveling in brutally cold weather. It knows instinctively that the temperature is actually seventy-five below zero and that no one should be out in such "tremendous cold." The man reaches Henderson Creek, which has frozen and can be used as a trail but is also riddled with dangerous winter springs that never freeze and are hidden beneath a thin layer of river ice. Although he is short on imagination, the man uses human judgment and alertness to avoid these traps. At one suspicious-looking spot on the trail, he forces the dog to go ahead of him. The dog breaks through into the water but scrambles out, saving itself from freezing to death by instinctively biting away the ice that clings to its feet. The man removes a glove to help the dog, and to his surprise, his bare fingers are numbed instantly by the bitter cold.

Part III

When the man stops for lunch he is startled at the speed with which his fingers and toes go numb, and for the first time he becomes frightened at the intensity of the freezing weather, knowing that numbness precedes hypothermia. Suddenly he remembers that he must build a fire "and thaw out" before trying to eat; he does so methodically, carefully building the fire with twigs as kindling before piling on larger pieces of wood. He also remembers that he once laughed at a man from Sulphur Creek who had warned him how cold the weather could get in the Yukon. Warmed and reassured after eating lunch by the fire, the man continues his journey - much to the dog's disappointment, as it longs to remain by the fire.

Part IV

After resuming his trek, the man breaks through the ice himself, getting soaked "half-way to the knees." Heeding the advice he'd been given by the "old-timer" from Sulphur Creek, the man builds another fire to save his frozen feet. He is angered yet unfrightened by this unexpected delay. He feels confident in his ability to save himself and smiles when he remembers the old-timers "womanish" injunction against traveling alone in temperatures colder than minus fifty. Nevertheless, he is disconcerted by the speed at which his extremities are freezing and realizes that his face and toes are frostbitten.

Part V

As the man starts to remove his frozen moccasins to dry them by the fire, disaster strikes:

It was his own fault, or, rather, his mistake. He should not have built the fire under the spruce-tree. He should have built it in the open. But it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire. Now the tree under which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs. No wind had blown for weeks, and each bough was fully freighted. Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree - an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster. High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow. This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them. This process continued, spreading out and involving the whole tree. It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out! Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and disordered snow.

The man was shocked. It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death. (Excerpt from "To Build a Fire")

Afterwards, the man calmly acknowledges to himself that the old-timer had been right about traveling with someone else who could help him out of danger. Just as calmly, he decides to rebuild the fire. Unfortunately, his hands are now so numb that he cannot make his fingers strike the matches and he drops them in the snow. He retrieves and lights the matches after several tries, burning himself badly in the process, but his damaged hands are too clumsy to prepare a fire that will last. The man thinks of killing the dog and thawing his hands in its carcass, but when he approaches the dog, it instinctively recoils at the fear in his voice and backs away. When the man at last catches the dog, he is unable to kill it; his hands have grown so numb that they are useless.

Part VI

Once the man fully realizes that he will die rather than simply lose his feet or hands to frostbite, he panics. He runs frantically, hoping to regain the feeling in his feet and to reach camp. Then he drops in exhaustion. Realizing that the numbness is creeping up his body, he starts off again in wild terror. The dog remains with him throughout his panic, and the man feels jealous anger at the animal's warm and healthy condition. Finally the man accepts his fate, letting the warmth and sleepiness of death-by freezing overtake him. As he is dying, he has an out-of-body experience: first he sees himself walking with his companions and discovering his frozen body; then he hears himself telling the old-timer from Sulphur Creek that he was right about not traveling alone in the brutal cold. Once the dog senses that the man is dead, it leaves him and heads for camp, where it knows it will find "other food-providers and . . . fire-providers."

Answer 3

The main conflict is man vs. nature; the main character is struggling to survive in the wilderness.

Answer 4

snow kept falling on the branches.