| Title | : | The Open Boat |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0871918269 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780871918260 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 64 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1897 |
The Open Boat Reviews
-
The tall wind-tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plicht of the arts. It represented, to a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual - nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.
A well-composed, atmospheric semi-autobiographical story on four shipwrecked men who are trying to save themselves and each other in a small boat at the mercy of the sea and the elements. It makes me want to listen to Elgar’s Sea Pictures again.
Review maybe later. -
I’ve never watched the film, Titanic. I always say it’s because I already know the boat [sic] sinks (though the real reason is that I assume it’s too sentimental). This story could have a similar problem as it’s explicitly based on the author’s experience a few months earlier, so you know at least one person survives. No matter. No sentimentality, either.
It opens with fear shown, not told:
“None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them.”
Four men, one injured, and two oars, in an open boat, after a shipwreck off Florida in January 1897.
The story is very simple. (To know anything about the wreck itself, you have to read Crane’s factual account, linked below.) However, it’s skilfully told, coming in waves, big and small, gentle and fierce, like the sea itself. The descriptions of natural and personal mood are vivid and visceral.
There’s the beauty of the murderous ocean:
“It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.”
There are petty squabbles coupled with camaraderie, dry humour, man’s insignificance and helplessness in the face of nature, and thus, existential angst and rage against “the seven mad gods of the sea” and Fate.
It’s all soaked in salty fear, laced with hope:
“The morning appeared finally, in its splendor with a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves.”
Hope, which can be dashed on the rocks.
Image: “Moonlit Shipwreck at Sea” by Thomas Moran (US artist), 1901 (
Source)
The relief of drowning
“When one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief.”
Aged 14, despite being a reasonable swimmer, I came close enough to drowning to lose consciousness. I was trapped, with my head under water. What felt like increasing pressure on my chest was physically painful, but I “wearied”, and suddenly it was as if that huge weight had gone; I was in a blissful, pain-free dreamy state. I didn’t see a white light at the end of a tunnel. My life flash past me. It was an abstract immersion in the soft embrace of colourful clouds and swirls. I don’t remember any sound. It was “a large degree of relief” for me, but presumably the point of great danger. Fortunately, I was pulled free very soon after, with no lasting harm.
A few years later, I read an article in New Scientist discussing the most and least painful ways to die, based in part on reports of those who’d come close. I forget what was worst (fire/burning, I think), but the description of drowning was exactly as I remembered it, and it was listed as (one of?) the nicest ways to die - short of dying in one’s sleep.
Quotes
• “These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.”
• “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.”
• “Often they [gulls] came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny”
• “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him… there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.”
Image: “The Shipwreck in a stormy sea” by Ivan Aivazovsky - wrong continent and a couple of decades too early for this story (
Source)
See also
• Crane’s original, article about how the Commodore was wrecked and how he escaped, published in the New York Press only three days after it happened,
here. Note the N-word is used nastily (not that there’s a nice way) in the subtitle and the text.
• William Falconer’s epic poem,
The Shipwreck, by W. Falconer, with a Sketch of His Life, especially the section
here:
“Again she plunges! hark! a second shock
Tears her strong bottom on the marble rock:
Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims, shuddering, roll their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke,
With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak.”
• Jack London’s To Build a Fire is another survival tale that I read a couple of weeks after this and reviewed
HERE.
• I can’t answer for Fate, but I’m off for some holy dairy food with crackers:
“Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention.”
That’s so amusingly bizarre, it made me think of Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch: script
here and video
here.
Short story club
I read this as one of the stories in
The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with
The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.
You can read this story
here.
You can join the group
here. -
The Open Boat by Stephen Crane - this month's The Short Story Club choice was rivetting.
Four men, on a life boat trying to reach shore in rough seas is the story Crane uses to take the reader through a whole gamut of emotions, and boy does he do this with style.
I thought this was a terrific story with a suffocating sense of foreboding. The tease of being so close to the shore then having to return to the open sea was just terrible, imagine that. I can understand the "oh so close" frustrations with Lady Fate - how cruel, but Fate (if such a thing exists) and Nature, as pointed out in this story - is disinterested. I prefer the term indifference, yes nature is indifferent to the destiny of us mere humans. This was the overwhelming theme for me in this story.
Wave after wave after wave – indifferent.
Other important themes for me - included the strong bond between the four seafarers experiencing this ordeal. Imagine - the proximity between the guys, the importance of working together to combat such a formidable adversary - Nature, an uncaring combatant indeed. The bonds you would forge with the others would last a lifetime - provided one survived.
They we past exhaustion, so exhausted one considered the sea to be a comfy bed, something he would slip into with exhausted relief, if the boat were to capsize. I got that.
Loved this. Oh, and Leonard, thanks so much for inviting me to this group.
4 Stars -
After a shipwreck, four men are in a lifeboat off the coast of Florida. The captain is injured, but is setting the course. The cook is bailing water out of the dinghy as an oiler and a correspondent row. Nature is unforgiving--wave after wave threaten to overturn the boat. After two days of rowing the men are exhausted. A lighthouse is in sight, but it's uncertain that they can get to the shore.
"The Open Boat" is semi-autobiographical. Stephen Crane was traveling to Cuba on the USS Commodore during the Spanish-American War when the boat sank. He survived and wrote this story. Through Crane's descriptions we can feel the power of the ocean, see the gray bleakness that surrounds the dinghy, and imagine the fatigue in the men's muscles. Is it fate that determines whether mere men will survive when facing the more powerful force of nature?
Reread for the Short Story Club -
5★
“Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.”
I used to love the old seafaring adventure novels, but I haven’t tried re-reading any. I feel pretty certain they wouldn’t capture my imagination the way they did when I was young.
This could well have been an excerpt from a book like those. I think the reference to a bath-tub to describe their dinghy (or dingey, as Crane spells it), instantly describes how much this little craft is at the mercy of the roiling seas. The fact that there are four men crammed in, makes any movement on their part problematic.
When they aren’t being slung up and over the walls and crests of waves, they are being bobbed around like the tiny speck they are in the ocean.
The captain, who is wounded, has seen his ship go down. The oiler, the cook, and the correspondent are the other three. They have oars and are taking it in turn to row, but after two days and nights, they are about done.
One man begins to rail against ‘Fate’.
“ ‘The whole affair is absurd.... But no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.’
. . .
Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds: ‘Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!’ ”
There was nobody climbing the rigging of one of those tall ships, as in the seafaring novels I used to enjoy, but the spirit was certainly there.
I didn’t realise, until I looked up some background while writing this, that it’s based on Crane’s own experience when the ship he was on sank between Cuba and Florida. He was the correspondent.
I also never realised the author died so young, only 28. I knew about his famous Civil War novel,
The Red Badge of Courage, which was written a couple of years before this, and just assumed he continued to write. Think what he might have given us had he lived another 50 or 60 years.
There is much discussion about his style being different from that of the times (late 1800s), but that’s for scholars to argue. I just enjoyed the ride - the literary one, not the terrifying one!
This is another choice of the
The Short Story Club Group (click link).
Read the story first. The background may spoil it for you. It is available in many places, and you can read ithere.
https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/cra... -
A free online link to the short story:
http://www.online-literature.com/cran...
Ernest Hemingway recommended this author and this short story. In his view it is
Stephen Crane's best.
Four men in an open boat off the coast of Florida. They have been shipwrecked. The open boat is a ten-foot dingey. The waves are roiling in. Three days and two nights in icy waters-- bailing out water, rowing and rowing. Land is in sight, but can it be reached?
The writing is simple, but ever so powerful. What one feels is the puniness of man and the strength, the beauty and the overwhelming power of nature. In extremity where can men turn, but to to each other.
Read this. It is very good. -
In “The Open Boat,” one of the finest short stories in the language, Crane relies on tone and imagery to portray the heartless indifference of nature. The famous opening line, “None of them knew the colour of the sky,” establishes an immediate bleakness, a world void of the emotional value of the colour. The sea had to describe as grey, and the only green, suggestive of hope, is that of the land that the men cannot reach.
-
The best use of impressionism I've ever read. Crane addresses the existential crisis of man in such a poignant manner, that it's difficult to let go of the overwhelming and conflicting sensation of being understood and still being helpless that this story resonates.
We are so small. We are so ignorant. Does our insignificance outweigh our importance? When facing nature, our greatest adversary, who do we rely on but the brotherhood of mankind?
In just a few pages of irony and metaphors, Crane gives one of those stories that will stay- because this story so eloquently addresses both the shortcomings and strengths of man and the eternal question that haunts us when we are most awake: what is the point?
I guess this story really lights up one of the most important reasons we read: to know that we aren't alone. Crane's message about the gift of society actually renders true here then. I want to hug him.
Also, Crane gave me a quote to obsess over, cry about and cherish:
"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important,
and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him,
he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply
the fact that there are no brick and no temples."
Wow. -
Stephen Crane’s short story, The Open Boat, is a microcosm of life itself. Four men are at sea in a lifeboat after the floundering of their ship, a captain, an oiler, a cook and a correspondent. We follow their efforts to get to shore after they have spotted land but while being kept offshore by a reef that blocks their entry. There is sorrow, fear, frustration, and desperation. The indifference of nature to their situation and the feeling that they are just specs in the ocean, unimportant to anyone and to God, grows as they continue to struggle against what seems to be their fate.
"IF I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"
Some of the things I believe Crane wants us to contemplate when we read this story: Why do we live? If death is the ultimate, unavoidable consequence of life, why do we live at all? Do we matter in the scheme of things? If we are so insignificant, what importance can our lives have? How cruel is hope in the face of the inevitable? Is it better to see a shore you cannot reach or to die searching for it? And, finally, who deserves to survive? Why do some of us arbitrarily endure while others, just as deserving, perish?
Finally, the correspondent recalls a poem he recited, with complete indifference, in school.
A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's
tears;
But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand
And he said: "I shall never see my own, my native land."
For the first time, he contemplates the soldier as a man, as a person losing his life on a foreign shore, a man just like himself; and he feels the connection, the connection to everyman. One cannot imagine that he will resume his indifference to the fate of others. Perhaps the meaning of this experience is the rare opportunity to see yourself as part of a whole, as one, but as one of many. -
“None of them knew the color of the sky.”
With that evocative line, Stephen Crane throws us into the world of four men trapped in a tiny dingy on high seas. The Captain, the Cook, the Correspondent, and the Oiler, castoffs of their ship sunk off the coast of Florida. We see the color of the waves as they continually break over the boat, feel the ache in their mussels as they pull oars and bail. We experience their frustration, close enough to shore to see it, yet can’t attempt to land for fear the high seas will swamp the boat too far from shore for them to swim for it. We feel their rage against fate:
“If I am going to be drowned - if I am going to be drowned - if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”
Crane’s friend, H.G. Wells wrote, “The Open Boat was beyond all question the crown of all Crane’s work.” Critic Elbert Hubbard wrote that it was “the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned.” Hemingway counted it as an important influence. The power of this story has not been diminished by the years. It is one of the greatest works in American short fiction. -
8/10
... which rating I may change in time. I was exhausted after reading this, feeling much like I'd spent a few days and nights, in an open boat, on the roiling sea. -
A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."--Stephen Crane
If Stephen Crane is remembered at all these days, it's probably as the author of that short Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a book I've read twice maybe but sadly never warmed to. That might be Crane's fault, because despite its brevity it's a rather hard book to finish, stiffly off-putting and overly symbolic, if I am recalling right. (As a teacher, eventually I took the title off my novel research paper list because not only was I never a fan, the book was inevitably chosen by the dimmest bulb in the classroom, selected for its short page count, and then never finished or understood, and the resulting paper was always a horrendous mess.) Or maybe it's Richard Thomas's fault, because from an early age I never liked that guy, and he was Henry Fleming in the movie version I saw as a kid long before I ever even tried to read or enjoy the novel.
I am a fan of Stephen Crane, however, as strange as that might sound now, mostly due to his poetry and shorter works, which appeal to me far more than his famous novel. His poetry is short and brutal, iconoclastic and cynical, devoid of the bells and whistles in his novel, and far more "modern" than anything being written at the time. Crane is a visceral author writing from the gut instead of the brain, and in that way his writing feels much closer to Norman Mailer or Charles Bukowski than it does to most of the authors who are nearer to him on the timeline. One of my favorite poems gives voice to Crane's gritty aesthetic:Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
"The Open Boat" certainly feels as if it is written in the red muck of things from Crane's heart, as it directly grows out of his experience as a newspaper correspondent on his way to cover the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Crane is attached to the S.S. Commodore, a boat carrying weapons to Cuban rebels, which goes down off the coast of Florida, and he spends two excruciating days in a small dinghy with three other shipmates battling the elements and desperately attempting to reach shore.
The story is a brutal look at man’s relationship to nature, a hostile world that has no sense of obligation to us humans. Crane captures the sublime power of the ocean with his blunt, matter-of-fact description: “As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.” But there’s also a terrifying sort of beauty here, too, that Crane captures: “The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse; shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.” It might have been even more glorious if Crane and his shipmates were not fighting for their lives to stay afloat and keep themselves within sight of shore.
“The Open Boat” is also a study of the resilience and dignity humans are capable of, and the camaraderie developed by the four men on that small boat (“Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea”!). Here Crane depicts the way humans on the edge of disaster can develop a mystical sort of bond that helps transcend the hardship: “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common.” Crane aptly writes, ‘ there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.” Crane also depicts in the story another kind of existential beauty in the way these men face the sea and the elements with a dignity in the face of mortality, and that too puts him in a rather remarkable, modern light as an author. As Crane writes in the newspaper article which eventually he adapted into this short story, he says, 'Here was death, but here also was a most singular and indefinable kind of fortitude," and that grace under the worst sort of pressure might just remind you of Hemingway, an author who owes a debt of inspiration to Crane.
However, there’s another reason why Crane should be read and remembered today. Although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get credit for it, with "The Open Boat" Crane deserves to be recognized as the literary forebear of the New Journalists of the 1960s and ‘70s. If you think of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, Mailer's Armies of the Night, or Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, four of the biggest non-fiction novels of the period, Crane is writing the same kind of "faction" here in this story more than half a century before these writers. Crane is the original gonzo journalist inserting himself into the action of the story and filtering the reporting through his own personal experience, and his writing lays the foundation for the kind of reporting that came to be known as “The New Journalism.” I’m sure Tom Wolfe would have liked to be given credit for the genre, and he did publish the collection that gave this term currency in the public’s eye, but Crane was doing the same kind of writing long before anyone in that anthology. “The Open Boat" has its origins in the newspaper article Crane wrote three days after his experience in the boat, and it's very interesting to compare the way the original newspaper piece is later shaped into the short story.
Here's a link to that article, "Stephen Crane's Own Story: He Tells How the Commodore Was Wrecked and How He Escaped," which gives a lot more background to the sinking of the boat: :
https://www.ponceinlet.org/z/-vf.0.0....
++++++++++++++++++
Read for GoodReads short story discussion group -
Stephen Crane, age 26, throws you into a dinghy (which serves as a lifeboat) for 4 survivors (including himself) of a steamboat that sank off the coast of Florida. Crane (1871-1900) is not a "Buried" writer, but he is a forgotten, neglected one, which is a pity. His simple, objective -- detached -- writing influenced Hemingway. Did anyone remember Crane when Hem published in the '20s ? (No!) ~ Clearly, Crane is a key American voice, but I wonder if he's even read in college lit classes today --such being the fickleness and dumbness of academia. (Just scan some GR reviews). In less than 50 pages, Crane captures the loneliness, desperation and trauma of being "lost at sea" -- with land in sight. As a reporter Crane himself was enroute to Cuba (yes, there are always problems there ) when this happened to him. He keeps you in the dinghy: there's no exposition or "back story" for the 4.
This story, along w others, can be found in a Collected Crane x Dover...but the print is crammed together and I refuse to take an eye test while reading anything. I bought as a single. Crane is another American Original like Jack London. We haven't had any in over 50 years. His story here is a metaphor for the Ordeal of Life. Some survive. But are they the lucky ones? -
This is the story of four men, a wounded captain, an oiler, a correspondant and a cook who spent three days in icy waters in a ten-foot tall dinghy after a shipwreck .
The descriptions of the sea, its colors and waves, feelings, states of mind, fatigue, physical and mental exhaustion as the hours pass is splendid.
The four men came in sight of shore but a reef prevents them from mooring, almost dying from fatigue, they jump in the waters and take their chance, on land, help arrives but at what cost?
The story reminded me of the old man and the sea, how cruel can nature be and how insignificant man can be . -
Aja te estabas ahogando pero y????? No había una forma más, no se, entretenida de contarlo? O menos repetitiva al caso?
Mi más sentido pésame al Stephen Crane que tuvo que pasar por eso, pero si le vas a sacar provecho hazlo mejor avd JAJAJAJA. -
A short story about a crew struggling to survive on the on the deck of a sinking boat. The shore is so close and so far at the same time for the exhausted seamen trying to keep themselves afloat. The story is a bit repetitive and narrative a little dull for my taste but glad to have given it a chance.
-
When one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief.
I only recently discovered the work of Stephen Crane, and previously reviewed this short story in this volume:
The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky And The Open Boat. First time through the towering waves I experienced "The Open Boat" in the audio version; but this time I read it.
There are autobiographical elements in this tale, and the events are vividly rendered, speaking to the impact they had on the "correspondent." There is a strong strain of futility in the face of the forces of nature, and yet somehow these implacable natural powers are both merciless and invigorating. Survival is something to be endured, and interpreted. -
Lol sorry but,
this was so boring to read.
Perfect for: fans of survival stories!
I am: not a fan of survival stories :( -
I’m not exactly sure why but for some reason this story reminded me a bit of Waiting for Godot
-
If I am going to be drowned, if I am going to be drowned, if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?
That was some powerful writing I just read. I am in awe of Stephen Crane. I remember reading Red Badge of Courage in middle school, but I didn't fully appreciate the brilliance of the book or Stephen Crane. I do now.
I wish there were more stars to give this story. -
"Quando ocorre a um homem que a natureza não o considera importante, e que ela não sente que mutilaria o universo ao dispensá-lo, ele deseja inicialmente atirar tijolos ao templo e odeia profundamente que não haja tijolos nem templos."
-
I read Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" while in high school and without ever giving it a second thought over the years I've always recommended it highly to anyone who's ever asked. But after reading "The Open Boat," it seems I'd forgotten exactly how powerful a writer Crane really was.
I've never quite shared in the ultimate philosophy of writers like London, Conrad, and Crane yet they perpetually rank among my favorites, mainly I think, because the masculine vocabulary and narrative of "naturalist" deism (and sometimes atheism) speaks so well to those like myself who are or have been in constant contact with the dangers of outdoor life and work; those who know that their fate rests primarily in their own hands; those who know that one slip-up could cost them not simply their daily meal but their very lives. The "naturalist" relies upon the observation that although there may be a "grand architect" behind all that we see in this world, he/she/it is indifferent to our cares. It is not an agnosticism, but really that the idea that revelation, miracles, or any type of divine relationship between man and his creator is nonexistant. It is the belief that in nature, we are at the mercy only of our own abilities. How Crane came to hold such views, especially at such a young age, I can't comprehend, yet they are very evident in "The Open Boat" and it makes for extraordinarily beautiful though lonely sentiment:
"...During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still --
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.
Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."
A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation..."
Crane does not entirely discount that miracles happen, just that they are rather rare natural turns of luck that few men are fortunate to witness or partake in. Near the end of the story, when rescue is at hand, a wave carries the "correspondent" over the capsized boat, he makes it a point to call this "a miracle of the sea."
However, Crane does give some hope in the story that even if we are at the mercy of nature, we are still worthy of survival because in the end we are capable of saving each other. For there are men, like the captain in the dinghy, that can still exhibit a duty toward other men as regards their cold station in life, and he paints a near messianic picture of his selflessness as he stood in the water with "a halo on his head" and shining "like a saint."
I never did nor will I agree with the basis of deism/naturalism but it makes for incredible literature. 4.5 stars and another look at Stephen Crane. -
I wasn’t previously familiar with the work of Stephen Crane.
This is about four men in a dinghy that is in danger of overturning.
These men are the cook, the oiler, the correspondent and the injured captain.
They are trying to get safely to land, but this is easier said than done.
They come from the steamer Commodore. The ship had gone down, but it is not explained how or why.
The story is exquisitely written.
At the start, the oiler steered with one of the two oars while the correspondent “pulled at the other oar”.
Why was the correspondent aboard the ship and what is an oiler?
We don’t know whether there are other members of the crew in another dinghy.
The cook thinks there’s a house of refuge “just north of the Mosquito Inlet Light that has a crew that will come and pick them up, whereas the correspondent says houses of refuge don’t have crews.
The cook is squatting in the bottom of the boat and the injured captain is lying in the bow. The oiler is in the stern.
The boat bounces from the top of each wave and the spray splashes past the men.
“It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.”
The oiler and the correspondent rowed.
The men saw the lighthouse at Mosquito Inlet.
The captain says they’ll make it if the wind holds and the boat doesn’t swamp.
The cook bails the water.
A ”subtle brotherhood of men” was established.
The lighthouse grew slowly larger.
The cook recalls that the life-saving station was abandoned a year ago.
The surf’s roar was ”thunderous and mighty”. ’We’ll swamp sure’, said everybody.”
Nobody seemed to see them.
Sometimes the men are desperate, sometimes hopeful. Men on the land waved at them.
“”If I am going to be drowned --- why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come this far and contemplate sand and trees?”
A shark was following the boat.
They “try a run through the surf”.
They picture their chances of survival.
“Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.”
I won’t reveal the ending. -
Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” is a great example of a survival story that delves into Naturalism and mankind’s place in the universe. Although Crane uses quite a simplistic plot—four men in a boat, each with a role, in a life or death struggle to reach the shore amid the tumultuous sea—there are quite a few symbolic and thematic aspects within the story that goes beyond the surface of this premise. Our four individuals (the cook, the correspondent, the captain, the oiler) on board have a distinct responsibility and trait within the confines of the boat. Crane has an effective way of utilizing both dialogue and description of sea to move the plot forward, and his prose is quite exact in describing the “other” character in this tale, the sea itself: “She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficial, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent.”
Similar to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, this is illustrative of a model survival story where humans are pitted the indifferent forces of Nature. -
This classical tale, by Stephen Crane, was an interesting choice for our short-story group. It concerns four men whose plight was to be shipwrecked and tossed about in a stormy sea in a leaking dinghy. Two of these unfortunate souls had to take turns rowing in order to keep the boat upright and to try to minimize their contact with the roiling ocean.
The narrative profoundly exposed the fears and the hopes of these unfortunate, perhaps doomed, passengers. From the first page onward there was a relentless tension which seemed to build with each page. This brief story has left me with many thoughts, analyses and appreciation for the skill that it required to pen such impactful words. -
girl i guess
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So elegantly written. This was the first survival novel that really spoke to me. And it made me think in new ways. And if that wasn't enough, the poetry in this book has stayed with me for decades, come back to me at times like verses in a well-known song. It takes especially great writing to do that.
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Το είχα διαβάσει στο πανεπιστήμιο (ήταν μέρος της ύλης κάποιου εξαμήνου) και θυμάμαι την απίστευτη αίσθηση ματαιότητας, αυτό το χαρακτηριστικό "Nature's Indifference to Man" - βασικό μοτίβο του Νατουραλισμού του Crane. Σε λίγες σελίδες, τα λέει όλα.
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This was a shorter read which wasn’t bad. I liked that it was based off of real experiences, and the use of American realism. It was very slow though, but I understand the slowness to it because they were stuck in sea. It just wasn’t something I got into as much.
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Only reading this because it's a homework.
I realize that it's typically Naturalistic to be so pessimistic and to root out all signs of hopes but this is just too heavy. The four men kept on hoping and it got them nowhere, even though they were saved eventually (most of them). This was not fun for me... the only thing that got me interested was that song about the solider dying in Algiers.
-because yaay he mentioned Algiers-
