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Stephen Crane's The Open Boat

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Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and how individual struggles do not matter when fighting nature. “The Open Boat” is a short story written by the American author Stephen Crane first published in 1897. The story is based on Crane’s own experience of surviving a shipwreck while working as a correspondent, its main themes are: nature and men’s role in nature, feeling insignificant, death and hope and friendship. The story follows four characters who suffer a shipwreck together and try to make it to the shore in order to survive. The four vastly different characters form a sense of comradery during their struggle against nature and death, however neither the difference between them, nor the comradery between them have influence on whether they …show more content…

All characters come to a similar insight about nature at first they see nature as an enemy, as a something that is for some inherently wrong reason intent on haunting and hurting them, as can be derived from the first page where the waves are described as ‘ wrongfully and barbarously abrupt’. By describing the waves as wrongful and barbarous the characters indicate that they see the waves as a sentient being, which is actively trying to harm them with malicious intent for no good reason. However, later in the story they all come to the realization that nature just is, and is not in fact actively trying to kill them. The sea itself does not change, but the perception of the characters do. In the story the narrator describes the sea as snarling and violent , however at the end the waves just pace and fro, while not being any less violent. Hope and friendship is something that all characters do experience, the narrator gives a description of the budding sense of friendship between the characters. Hope is a prominent idea present in the story, since hope is essentially all the characters have while they are stuck at sea and is something that binds the characters together. However, disappointment is also present and is linked to hope. An example which illustrates this is the scene where the men find a lighthouse and are

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Stephen Crane an author known at the time to be considered one of the greatest American Authors who wrote during the era of Realism and Naturalism, In particular, one of his works titled “I Stood Upon A High Place” there are characteristics of Realism, its theme was based upon how a things were in his time period from 1865 through 1900 and his most identifiable work is a novel “The Red Badge Of Courage” a very popular work of Stephen Crane. Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey he was the last born of fourteen children, only nine survived, Reverend Crane, Stephen’s Father was well known Methodist minister and his wife Helen Crane. Reverend Crane in 1880 passed away of pulmonary complications, Stephen was only nine when his father passed away, two years after Mrs. Crane and her family moved to a small village named Port Jervis, New York, near the Delaware River, Stephen Crane did not have a full belief in Christianity, but later on his sister Agnes Crane passed away and he took that as a sign from God when it was a lightning storm when she has passed away, his works of religious poems and some others reflected

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