What theme is common to the two excerpts below? ... His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in it he lacked the endurance. Several times he stumbled, and
finally he tottered, crumpled up, and lell. When he tried to rise, he failed. must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely
walk and on keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite ne warm and comfortable. He was not
shivering, and even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk. And yet, when he touched his nose or cheeks, there was
no sensation. Running would not thaw them out. Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet. Then the thought came to him that the frozen
portions of his body must be extending. He tried to keep this thought down, to forget it, to think of something else; he
aware of the
panicky feeling that it caused, and he was afraid of the panic. But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his
body totally frozen.
(ack London, To Build a Fire)
2. Presently the boat also passed to the left of the correspondent with the captain clinging with one hand to the keel. He would have
appeared like man raising himself to look over a board fence, if it were not for the extraordinary gymnastics of the boat. The
correspondent marvelled that the captain could still hold to it.
They passed on, nearer to shore-the piler, the cook, the captain-and following them went the water-jar, bouncing gayly over the seas.
The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy-a current. The shore, with ts white slope of sand and its green bluff,
topped with little silent cottages, was spread ke picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a
gallery looks at a scene from Brittany
Algiers.
He thought' am going to drown? can be possible? Can it be possible? Can it be possible?* Perhaps an individual must consider his own
death to be the final phenomenon of nature."
(Stephen Crane, The Open Boan)
A. mysteries of life and death
B.
finding hope after tragedy
C.
humanity's helple
azainst nature