Determinisim in “To Build a Fire” and “The Blue Hotel” plays a very large role. Outside factors such as heredity and environment are essential to both naturalistic literary works. The characters in the works lack free-will, so the plot takes an inevitable course.
The Swede is the character in “The Blue Hotel” that experiences the central conflict. The conflict he deals with is his discomfort in the hotel. One factor that contributes to his discomfort is his inherited character traits. The Swede is seen as strange to the other characters because he is an immigrant from New York. At one point, they wonder if he is really Dutch due to his awkward nature. Another contributing factor is the environment. All of the characters in the story are confined in the hotel because of a snowstorm. This shows determinism because the snowstorm prevented him from going anywhere else. If the Swede was able to leave, he probably would have survived.
In “To Build a Fire” the main character struggles to survive in the harsh Alaskan environment. Throughout the story, he builds multiple fires that fail to keep him satisfied. Determinism governs the course of action in this story because the man is unable to defeat the extreme environmental conditions. Also, he is succumbed to his inexperience to the terrain. His inexperience is a character trait that caused him to make the bad decision of not listening to a native.
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