“To Build A Fire” By Jack London And “The Story Of The Hour” By Kate Chopin

Many authors have graced the pages of writing, but when they can touch you and can full you with an understanding in such details that it awakening your senses to a new light, it then becomes a piece of art. A part of you as you will see with the authors that follows.

In “To Build a Fire,” Jack London uses realistic and sometimes unpleasant images to describe how cold the air is. For example, the man’s spittle “crackled in the air”. London could have just written that it was colder than 50 below. By using the image of spit freezing in the, the reader gets a clear picture of how cold it is. Another piece that incorporated nitty gritty details is Upton Sinclair the jungle. Sinclair describes the dangerous conditions the workers endured: The pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands till and acid had eaten their fingers off”. Sindair spares no gruesome details in deserting the injuries. These deceptions were shocking and reader felt outrage. Although outraged, it also brought enlightenment to the reader for a thought processing understanding.

In “The Story of the Hour” by Kate Chopin, Mrs. Mallard “she wept at once with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sisters arms”. When told her husband was in an accident and died one viewing this would feel sorrow for Mrs. Mallard, Once Mrs. mallard was alone her thoughts became her own and a moment of illumination came over her. “She was a free body and soul”. Once Mrs. Mallard touches “the elixir of life” to have it stolen away within minutes was too much to bare and Mrs. Mallard died seeing her husband alive. Chopin predicted what a mind can do while Sinclair “From the Jungle” allowed us to see what a working environment can do to humans. Going from healthy humans to horror unknown to most. Working conditions that cause diseases and missing body parts to death. “Most people would have been skeptical” to believe such things but could not be skeptical about the workers that bore the evidence of “joints on fingers being eaten by acid”, “one by one”, would bring awareness and change to the work placed and humans.

Each author depicted describes how elements can break down a human. Rather it be from the weather, the mind, or on the conditions one is experiencing, all seem to suffer one way or another. Only by putting their story on paper does it awaken an awareness is us that one may or may not react to but will never forget.