A Transitivity Analysis Of Mental Transformation In Jack London’s Love Of Life And To Build A Fire

Love of Life and To Build A Fire are among the best of Jack London’s short stories. They are both set in the infinite and hostile Yukon Territory of northwestern Canada and share related thematic significance on life and death. Left in barren and biting winter alone, the two unnamed protagonists struggle against the threat of death, both physically and mentally, with the man in Love of Life surviving while the man in To Build A Fire dying. This process also witnesses the protagonists’ mental transformations: the man in Love of Life embraces his mental activeness after struggling between the inertia and initiative, and the man in To Build A Fire also expresses his spiritual power after experiencing over-confidence and the challenges of powerlessness. Their final spiritual greatness casts a clear light upon the feasibility of the appreciation of the novel from a mental view, specifically from the perspective of mental changes. However, previous study is mostly carried out on these two stories respectively and focuses mainly on the physical acts rather than spiritual activities, and on content level rather than the language skills. By contrast, the present paper adopts transitivity system of Halliday’s Functional Grammar to demonstrate the protagonists’ subtle changes in their inner world, and analyzes their life-and-death attitudes: the slightest hope to live deserves the greatest zeal, and when there is no hope left, the choice of dying in peace has to be made to preserve the last dignity and honor as a human being. Thus, this paper will provide a relatively new approach and perspective, and enrich the study of these two stories.