To Make a Connection We've all experienced those days when it seems like the universe is out to kill us, or at least psychologically mutilate us. A series of mundane irritants pile up into a seemingly unmanageable and insurmountable mountain, completely derailing any attempt at productivity... and in the midst of this among many other frustrating, but trivial, scenarios, lies the nagging doubt that it all isn't is of no use. It vaguely occurs to us that this is just an intermediary between birth and becoming worm food, that we are just matter and energy that will eventually decompose and contribute to new configurations of matter and energy. It also vaguely occurs to us that this random rearrangement of atoms will also fall under the gaze of an omnipresent god? Force? An extraterrestrial being? Or, perhaps more distressing still, it occurs to us that the gaze is nothing more than an apathetic void. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay It is up to the nature writer to unpack such thoughts. Authors like Jack London and Stephen Crane, whose respective short stories “To Build a Fire” and “The Open Boat” exemplify the genre, seek to push this truth to its logical and chilling conclusion: that we are all just matter and energy with intention. , and this alone does not entitle us to a nurturing and benevolent universe or to a sympathetic God. Although both stories contribute to the genre by depicting humans' relationship with their environment as inherently one-sided, the authors clearly subscribe to different interpretations of this relationship. London goes out of his way to construct a conflict based solely on biological and practical matters, while Crane delves deeper into the psyche of humans looking death in the eye and meekly asking, "Why me?" Why now? Although achieved primarily through the use of overtly hostile environments, the stories' themes are also carried through the repetition of key phrases that establish these authors' divergent viewpoints. In “Building a Fire,” for example, the protagonist's repeated thought “it was certainly cold” first results in an observation of empirical fact: the long thought process preceding this statement is that of jaded observation, which “n 'made no impression'. on man” because his concern “is not so much with the meaning” of the information as with how it immediately applies to him – in this case, simply as an obstacle (809). Here, the phrase "it was certainly cold" is just an annoying reflection of his position in the Yukon, not an instinctive fear swelling beneath his civilized mind to warn him. Indeed, “[t]hat there should be something more than that was a thought that never entered his mind” (809); the protagonist, this inexperienced chechaquo, sees this environment only as a passing obstacle that he will surely overcome - so surely, in fact, that the thought of his death on the tundra and the fear that follows it does not bother him. even comes to mind at this point. Contrast this with the final repetition of the phrase, where it appears only a few lines before he learns that the man died of exposure, and that he does so with a certain sense of voluntary resignation, insisting that the “old hoss” who warned him of the folly of his actions was right all along (818). The man no longer sees the point in fighting and seems to succumb gracefully to the cold. This establishes afeeling of responsibility, according to Donald Pizer. In his review of Lee Clark Mitchell's book Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism, Pizer rejects Mitchell's idea of ​​a universal determinism that allows for no real opportunity for human "free will"; In the case of the London chechaquo, Mitchell insists that this lack of action ultimately propelled the man to a frozen death. Pizer, however, argues that London's "constant attachment to blame and thus moral responsibility" towards the intrepid protagonist clearly makes the case for human action rather than human helplessness (260) . Man has exceeded his biological limits and rightly suffers the consequences. London associates the death of the chechaquo with the man's own lack of awareness, his own lack of "imagination" that could have intervened and alerted him to his fatal positive attitude that ineffectively defied the hostile Yukon winter. This man's death, London suggests, could easily have been avoided if he had only exploited his basic survival instincts rather than his purely human desire to conquer a hostile environment for the purely human desire to obtain arbitrarily significant wealth. By rejecting the instinctive understanding that humans must bend their will, contort their imagination, to their environment, and not the other way around, the chechaquo illustrates London's belief that, although death is obviously inevitable, misplaced arrogance , lack of respect and lack of intuition the imagination that recognizes things worthy of respect will exacerbate the process. Crane also illustrates the inevitability of death in "The Open Boat"; However, even more than London, Crane insists that respect and willingness to be held responsible for failure are worthless when the Universe is so clearly indifferent to human – or any – life. Unlike "To Build a Fire," Crane's short story revolves around characters trapped in a situation where nothing but divine intervention can bring relief. The chechaquo knowingly rejects the experience of his comrades, but the shipwrecked crew of "The Open Boat" find themselves in danger despite their combined knowledge, experience and caution. The crew's repeated feeling: "If I'm going to drown... why... was I allowed to come this far...?" (784) suddenly becomes much more poignant; it suggests an ingrained sense of injustice over a situation that, based on their collective skills, should not have happened. Here, even in the presence of fear, prudence and probably the "imagination" which London's protagonist lacks, are rendered insignificant by a Universe which sees neither good nor evil, the skillful or the unskilled, the sensitive nor completely instinctive. Furthermore, the crew's feeling of drowning after "reaching that point" is comparable to the experience of all humans confronting their own mortality. Because this feeling is collective ("As for the thoughts of men... they might be put thus") rather than individual, and yet is neither more nor less significant than the supplications of an individual, Crane presents this density of despair as totally powerless and objective. useless (784). The mere presence of a passionate struggle or seething rage does not – and cannot even – impose itself on an indifferent Universe. There is no attribution of responsibility in the case of these four crew members, and this lack of responsibility, coupled with their frantic and diligent struggle, manifests itself in a deep sense of injustice. Here, Crane suggests, the will to live does not give one the right to life. No matter how “good” or how “well” we act,..