The Open Boat

This was not my favorite piece this week. I understand that it has significance, and I do appreciate the imagery, but again, not my kind of story. I enjoyed Stephen Crane’s poetry- short, dark, ironic and to the point. I could see his naturalist tendencies at work in this story, as the four men battled the sea for their lives. Trapped in their little dinghy, they relied on each other to survive, taking turns rowing their small boat through the rocking waves. Crane makes the sea almost come alive, it is so aggressive and seemingly bent on their destruction. In section VI, the narrator makes the observation that to have worked so hard to survive and then to still be drowned by the “seven mad gods” of the sea was surely an injustice- he realizes that nature does not value him or his life. He is insignificant. Much like the poem “A Man Said to the Universe”, the universe feels no obligation to the men in the boat. In section VII, the correspondent sees the tall, deserted wind-mill on shore, and it causes him to think about nature. To him, nature no longer seemed brutal, it was unfeeling, indifferent, uncaring. It gave him the opportunity to see his life and all of its mistakes, and he wished for the chance to repair them. At the end, the overturned men are swimming for shore, and nature’s unpredictability is shown. As a wave flings the correspondent towards the shore in a “miracle of the sea”, the cook and the captain survive, but the oiler apparently drowns.