The Perfect Storm Analysis

Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm is a tragically true detailed account of lives of the crew members of the Andrea Gail, a longline swordfishing boat that was caught in the 1991 “Perfect Storm” and submerged in the North Atlantic ocean with its passengers never to be seen again. The novel focuses on the crew and the main idea is centered around their lives and the dangers of longline fishing. The story does not follow the man vs nature theme; though the storm took the lives of the crew, they faced danger at every turn of the page and were taken from their lives the day they first set sail. Captain Billy Tyne, Bobby Shatford, Dale Murphy, David Sullivan, Michael Moran, and Alfred Pierre are the crew members whose stories are told through

His writing ranges from lyrical aurete to forthright. Junger incorporates the Frame Story literary device with the intention of organizing several similar stories and revealing the connections at the end. Junger also uses flashback to reveal background, foreshadowing to provide suspense where it’s lacking and convey information that gives readers that “Ah ha!” feeling later in the text after all is revealed, and personification to add life. Junger cannot be entirely sure of the final moments of Andrea Gail and her crew and tries his best to speculate and draw reasonable conclusions without assumption. With this obstacle in mind, Junger writes this story not about the Romantic action of man against a terrible force of nature but about the lives taken by the storm and the lives that loss has affected. It is a story of remembrance, not entertainment. He uses first person accounts to keep suspense while still speculating so as not to bore the reader and not to lose the climactic edge. He switches in tense sometimes without bothering to end the sentence first; I find this authentically chaotic. “If Billy attempts to come around that late in the storm, he’d make sure the decks were cleared and give her full power on the way around.” (Junger,