The Old Schoolhouse Magazine

The problem with using To Build a Fire to teach these lessons is that they flatly contradict the point Jack London was trying to make with his story. The importance of diligence and humility are our ideas, not his.

London’s point is that the Man could not possibly have worked hard, planned ahead, or listened to the advice offered him. He was doomed before he started by deterministic forces utterly beyond his control, from the merciless cold to his own inherited lack of imagination. Furthermore, the Man’s lack of character had absolutely nothing to do with his failure, because the concepts of character and morality appear nowhere in To Build a Fire. London’s message is that you are stuck within the limitations of your species and there is nothing you can do about it but die—and your death will come all the more quickly if you fail to kill your dog.

To Build a Fire was
intended to be a
dark story, devoid of
moral lessons.

To Build a Fire was intended to be a dark story, devoid of moral lessons. When we use it to teach such lessons anyway, we misread the story on purpose. In the process, we teach our students to ignore the author’s words and substitute words of their own, and eventually to remake every book they read into the sermon they heard last Sunday.

In his masterful book An Experiment in
Criticism, C. S. Lewis warns us against this
error in words that could easily have been
directed to well-meaning teachers of To
Build a Fire or any “non-Christian” story:
We are so busy doing things with
the work that we give it too little
chance to work on us. Thus increas-
ingly [in our reading] we meet only
ourselves. 1

True Christian Reading
But why does it really matter if we use
an author’s words for our own ends?
We parents are trying to teach Christian
morality to our students. Does not this
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all-important end justify whatever means
we choose?

Hillsdale College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. He and his wife Missy are the authors of Teaching the Classics, the popular reading and literature curriculum. They teach their children at home in Rice, Washington. For more information, visit www.centerforlit.com.

Endnotes:

1. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Canto ed. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 85.

2. Ibid., p. 19.

When we use a story
. . . to teach moral
lessons that the
author did not intend,
we tell a lie about the
author . . . .

The Epistle of James, which was in-
tended to teach moral lessons, exhorts
us to “. . . be swift to hear, slow to speak,
slow to wrath . . .” (James 1: 19). This is the
very heart of what it means to read like
a Christian. Let the author say what he
means to say, and don’t interrupt. Again,
C. S. Lewis puts it best:
The first demand any work of art
makes upon us is surrender. Look.
Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of
the way. There is no good asking
first whether the work before you
deserves such a surrender, for until
you have surrendered you cannot
possibly find out. 2

What About “Non-Christian”
Books?

You may well ask, what good is To Build a Fire, then? If it is dark and depressing and hopeless but cannot be redeemed by reading Christian values into it, why in the world should we read it?