A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die…. Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known.

This passage comes from Jack London’s Yukon tale “To Build a Fire,” in which an unnamed man travels alone through extreme subzero cold despite warnings about the danger of such temperatures. As his feet freeze and he fails to keep a life-saving fire going, he becomes progressively incapacitated. Near the end, with death imminent, he experiences the characteristic drowsiness and deceptive calm associated with hypothermia. London, who drew on his own experiences in the Klondike and on popular accounts of Arctic survival, uses the man’s final thoughts to render the physiological and psychological slide from panic into surrender.

The lines capture the grim seduction of hypothermia: terror gives way to a narcotic sense of ease, and death is reframed as “sleep” and “anaesthetic.” London’s irony is sharp—the man’s “good idea” is not wisdom but the mind’s rationalization when the body can no longer fight. The passage also reinforces a central theme of the story: nature’s indifference and the fatal consequences of overconfidence. The comfort he feels is not redemption but the final illusion, underscoring how quickly human agency collapses when confronted with elemental cold.