Journal 16

Journal 16 – Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” and London’s “To Build A Fire” 

Read the following quote and discuss how it applies to the main characters in both stories.  In the course of this discussion, address how each of the characters is both similar and different:

“Determinisim governs everything … The writer must study the inherited traits of individual characterand the social condition of the time.  Together, these elements determine the course of any action, the outcome of any life.  Free will or self-determination is mostly an illusion, although chance is granteed a role in human affairs.  Still, even the effects of chance are obliterated in the inevitable course determined by the interaction of inherited character traits and the social environment.“  

The main characters of “The Blue Hotel” and “To Build a Fire” each have different circumstances that ultimately lead to their premature deaths. The swede in Blue Hotel alienates everyone in the hotel into his eventual murder while the man in To Build a Fire simply succumbs to the harsh elements of a northern winter. Both these men and their fates were foreshadowed by the author, the only one who truly knew their fates.

Determinism argues that all actions can be pre-determined based on a the traits of a person and their circumstances. Even their choices can be pre-determined because free will is an “illusion” in determinism. Every choice can be predicted by the circumstances. The Swede predicts that he will die because he believes that people shoot each other all the time in the wild west. He ends up actually dying because he offended everyone at the hotel.

The man in “To build a fire” is travelling in the freezing cold, and because of the circumstances he was in it was likely he would die. He thought he was going to live but his inexperience in travelling in the extreme cold,