Nature In Lodon And Eastman

Nature can be a strong, brutal, and deadly or calm and peaceful, but it never lacks power and strength.   It controls all of those within it, and man will never be able to control it.   This is the way that Jack London portrays nature in The Law of Life, and To Build a Fire.   Nature is a force that won't be reconed with.   Nature can also be seen as connected to man, and mournful or angry when wrongs are committed.   This is the way that Charle's Eastman uses nature in From the Deep Woods to Civilization.   Both recognize the power and strangeness that nature creates.   In both Eastman's work and London's work we see the romanticism of nature, and of death.   London shows it as powerful and unsympathetic while Eastman shows it as a peaceful signifier of death.

London uses nature in a more brutal and relentless sense than we see in Eastman.   The characters in his stories The Law of Life, and To Build a Fire are in a battle with nature for their lives.   the both take place up North in some of the coldest parts of the world, and both link the cold, frost and snow to death.   Not a violent death, but a peaceful death in nature, and it seems that this is the reason that the characters in both of his stories accept it so readily.   

In The Law of Life we see a reference to snow and death in the first paragraph.   "...too busy to waste a thought on her broken grandfather, sitting alone in the snow..." (972 London, The law of Life)   The main point is he is sitting alone in the snow.   His grandaughter is busy doing the things in life that he is no longer a part of and doesn't notice him sitting there.   "...Life called her, and the duites of life, not death. And he was very close to death now." (p972 London, The law of Life)   The snow is a natural signifier of death for him.   It is further referenced when his son cones to share his last words with him "...Even now it is snowing. / "Ay, even now it is snowing."   (p.973 London, The law of Life)   It is there final conversation...