"To Build a Fire" is a classic example of literary Naturalism, a movement originally proposed in the late 1800s by French novelist Émile Zola and introduced to America by Frank Norris. Naturalism was a subcategory of literary Realism, which emerged in the mid 1800s as a response to Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Romantic and Transcendentalist literature valued emotion and intuition, emphasized the importance of self-reliance, and rejected many aspects of modernity. Transcendentalists in particular believed that humans had a spiritual connection to nature and were deeply distrustful of industrialization.
While the Romantic movement was inherently idealistic, Realist authors strove to represent their subject matter truthfully and chose to depict everyday characters and experiences. Naturalism in particular was characterized by determinism, scientific objectivism, and pessimism. Naturalist authors typically wrote in a detached, impersonal tone, and their texts often dealt with characters whose fates are determined by forces outside their control. Central to literary Naturalism is the belief that humans have no special connection to the natural world and that nature is fundamentally indifferent to human life.
"To Build a Fire," which utilizes a dispassionate tone and focuses on the indifference of nature to humankind, is a quintessentially Naturalist story, though it departs slightly from other Naturalist texts in its portrayal of the scientific method. While Naturalism as a whole tended to embrace scientific objectivity, "To Build a Fire" argues that humans cannot fully understand the natural world through observation and experimentation.
