Explication of The First Paragraph of Jack London's "To Build a Fire"

To Build a Fire The first line of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" states, "Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey..." London repeats the words "cold and grey" to emphasis the environment that the man finds himself in. It is cold, twenty-five degrees colder than the man thinks that it is, he is in a temperature that is seventy-five degrees below zero. Extremely cold and forbidding, the grey casts a pall …

…to man's intuitive thoughts, the instinctual ones that some men consider less valid because they come from the unconscious mind. His unwillingness to contemplate the extreme cold, the barely used trail, his dog's instincts, reflect the man's inability to view the whole picture. As London puts it "the man had no imagination" he thought only to keep moving and stay dry, then he would be fine, however the man in the end could do neither.