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 character and 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.“
It is very possible to compare this quote to “The Blue Hotel.” In the quote, it talks about how one individual character is able to effect their whole surrounding, which is exactly what happens in this story. When the three men came off the train and into the hotel, there was one who started to become very paranoid. Thinking it was the wild west, he feared that there had been murders in the hotel and that he might be next. By thinking such things and reacting in such a ridiculous ways, he began to effect the few people around him. Such as, when the hotel owner made him become drunk, the son partaking in a fight with the man, the cowboy saying to kill him during the fight, the journalist never saying that the man was right about the cheating, and finally, the man in the end who stabbed the drunken paranoid. Whether the effect is positive or negative, there is always an outcome.
Taking from the quote, you are able to compare free will to “To Build A Fire”. When the man was out looking for gold in Alaska, there were other native to the area who had told him many things, including not to go alone, in order to survive. Although he may have been told this, it was his freewill when he had chosen not to listen. All the negative things that had occurred had happened because of his negligence to listen. Such examples of this would be when he was told how cold the temperatures would reach to, but even so, he did not come prepared for it. Also, the only other “person” that he had brought with him was the dog, which at one point he was willing to kill, but was not able to even reach his knife in the end. All of these happenings started with the point on whether he was willing to listen and take the advice that given or not.
Although both of these stories may have different types of characters, or barely any characters to begin with, both of them have a negative social environment. In the end, both had a undesirable ending where they had died. Though one died from nature, and the other from, in a way, influencing his negative and disruptive behavior upon others which had him receive the undesirable outcome. When looking back at both of them, the characters could have avoided all of this. If they had just listened to the other people, they would have foreseen their outcome.
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