Historical Context in Stephen Cranes The Open Boat - Book Report/Review Example

Historical Context in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" We hear the phrase that art imitates life but rarely do we consider it in a real sense. One story that forces us to consider what exactly this phrase means is Stephen Crane's short story, "The Open Boat." This story is the perfect example of art reflecting life because it is based on a very real, true, and horrific story that happened to Crane. Crane lived to retell the story and the fact that it is based on a true event almost changes how we read it because we know that more than imagination goes into this piece of literature. Real life, real emotions, and real people enter into this story and make it more real. Crane was already noted as a realist writer and this story emphasizes his technique. The small dinghy, the large and engulfing ocean, the uncertainty of their future, the characters with which he spent this amount of time are presented to us very realistically and because they are real, we can see the story as nothing other than real. "The Open Boat" captures all of the aspects of realism because it depicts a real situation in the real world with personal experience expressed through characterization, realism, and personification. The authors was actually stranded in a boat on the ocean. "The Open Boat" cannot help but be real because of the author's experience. It is fiction but it is more than that because we know that it is real. It is because of the story's real history that makes it stick in our minds. Fiction changes when we know that there is a portion of reality added to the mix. Fiction opens a door to a world that does not exist. When we know that a story has an element of reality involved, we are immediately drawn to the real world. Even if we do not want things to change, they do. The story changes because we know it is real. Metzger agrees with this notion, adding that the story is realistic because of the "facts presented, the perspectives employed" (Metzger) and he adds: The contrasts stated are all joined in the work to describe not only some impressive facts of life, but also to demonstrate some defensible generalizations, not only about human experience, but also about how that experience is apprehended and how, when it is apprehended, we react to it" (Metzger). Indeed, the facts are presented and human generalizations are made and this completes a significant portion of the story. However, it does not complete the story. Other elements must be considered. These elements works together to create a story that is almost beyond real because we know that it actually happened. This knowledge changes our perspective, whether or not we are aware of it and heightens our interpretation of the story. Just as we change when a camera is aimed at us, we also change when we know that a story is based on fact. The "extra" knowledge adds an extra dimension to the story, making it more real. Benita Knapp concurs, explaining the details of Crane's personal experience. She reports that Crane once mentioned that "he wanted to go to some quarter of the world where mail is uncertain" (Knapp). Crane got to just this in November of 1896 when he set sail to cover the Cuban Revolution. Crane boarded the Commodore with Captain Edwin Murphy and not long afterward, the ship encountered thick fog. The aid of a local pilot did help the ship out of the fog but into a sandbar. While the boat was freed, it was not safe. In fact, no one would be able to guess the damage done to the ship. This damage was not recognized until later when the ship was at sea, when there was "no hope of saving the ship" (Knapp). Efforts to save the ship were fruitless and the leak caused severe damage to the ship. Eventually the engines gave out and those aboard were forced into lifeboats. According to Knapp, "Crane's conduct during this harrowing ordeal was superb: he soothed frightened men, helped bail out water, and acted like a born sailor. After the crew was in the lifeboats, Crane, the Captain, the cook and the oiler climbed into a ten-foot-long dinghy" (Knapp). "The Open Boat" feels real because it is real. The boat, in real life, was damaged and that caused the men to become stranded in the first place. In addition to personal events, the factual events become fictionalized in the story and the similarities are easy to identify. The characters, the setting, and the tone of the story reflect Crane's experience. For example, just as Crane was aboard a ship that "sprung a leak," the characters in his story also experience a similar destiny on the open ocean. The characters in the story find themselves upon the uneasy waves of the ocean, uncertain of their destiny. The ocean, the lifeboat, and the men themselves find their way into "The Open Boat." Each aspect of the story contributes something significant to the story and its interpretation. Bert Bender supports the notion that reality becomes fiction and vice versa in the story. He states, '"fact' and 'experience' in the story's subtitle ('A Tale Intended to be after the Fact: Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore') clearly signal that Crane is writing about an actual experience" (Bender). Bender asserts that the story moves from being a frightening experience to a religious one and this is what makes it so real for us. He writes that Crane prepares us for this kind of experience with the first lines of the story. When Crane writes, "None of them knew the color of the sky," Bender believes that Crane is setting the stage for the "spiritual nature of the following journey, one in which there will be considerable scanning of the heavens" (Bender). While experience is no doubt a personal thing, we can see how expressing it makes it real for us. While the story is fiction, it is based on Crane's real-life experience and pieces of the story reflect real experiences, and we can assume real emotions. The author was stranded with others in his real life situation. Characterization allows the story to be real. Glen Johnson maintains that one of the values learned from the story is one of self-knowledge. He states, "The representative here is the correspondent, the obviously autobiographical center of consciousness. The correspondent presents a successful collation of the involved and detached perspectives" (Johnson). The correspondent does not experience any luxuries from the ordeal because he is "deeply and desperately involved" (Johnson). We see this in his reactions to his immediate circumstance. His interpretation "is that life is 'an actuality--stern, mournful, and fine' all at once" (Johnson). He survives to represent a point of view for Crane's story. Similarly, the captain survives, wounded. Johnson notes that he is "withdrawn and dejected" (Johnson), but he feels compelled to offer direction to the other passengers, although he may secretly believe they will perish" (Johnson). According to Johnson, the cook is depicted as "clownish" (Johnson) and because he is not able to row physically, he serves as lookout for the on the dinghy. Interestingly, Johnson points out that the oiler is the only character that has a name and he is the character that dies at the end of the story. given a name. Johnson claims that this fact "constitutes the story's primary irony" (Johnson). These characters allow Crane to explore the various points of view from the deadly sea. The different characters allow Crane to explore different emotions associated with the experience. The omniscient observer compares his existence that of a mouse while he is being tossed at sea. He is forced to face his fear and this forces him to acknowledge what a fantastic struggle it is to stay alive. At times, he is angry at his current situation and compares himself to a mouse - a very small creature with little control over his fate upon the ocean. He sees himself as nothing but weak because he cannot control any of the factors that affect his fate. In short, he is powerless. These characters each illustrate a different perspective of Crane's personal experience. Realism is extremely important to the story regarding historical context because the experience is nothing if it is not real. From the early moments of the story, we must confront the turbulent sea along with these men. The imagery is most compelling when we realize that Crane experienced these very scenes. For example, we are told how the "waves were of a hue of slate, save for the tops, which were foaming white" (Crane 357). When he writes that "Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which rode upon the sea" (357), we know that he is speaking from experience and this changes how we perceive the story. The bonding that occurs between individuals that are in extreme circumstances is often difficult to relate. In the story, Crane does an excellent job recounting how the men attempt to survive. He writes, "it would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established" (361). Here we see that the men depended on each other for more than survival. In real life, Crane and these men faced the boisterous ocean. The boat becomes a symbol of survival for the men. Their journey on the sea symbolizes life's rough ride. We are constantly reminded of how small the boat is, reinforcing the idea of how little we are in control of our destiny. The boat is compared to a bathtub and later we are told that the small vessel seemed a "wee thing wallowing, miraculously top up, at the mercy of five oceans. Occasionally, a great spread of water, like white flames, swarmed into her" (361). It is also important to note how the boat is personified in the story. The boat is central the men's survival and it is referred to as a female much in the same way in which we refer to mother nature. These impressions are rather significant because it demonstrates how important the boat is to the men. It is much more than a boat - it is a lifeline. It is literally keeping the men afloat. In real life, the men saw a lighthouse. The lighthouse also becomes a symbol of hope. We are told, "the lighthouse had been growing slower" (361). This seemingly insignificant image is powerful because it represents the intensity of the men on the small boat upon the large sea. The lighthouse, similar to the boat is xxx. The lighthouse is also significant because it is inconstant, like the journey at sea and life's journey. While the lighthouse once thought to be a beacon of hope, became an awful disappointment. Just as it started as a faint speck on the horizon at the beginning of the story, it "vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared" (367). Here we see how that hope is a fleeting thing and that it must not be discarded with the first sign of discouragement. Crane takes us through a spiritual journey until the last lines of the story, which indicate a sense of interpretation from the survivors. They look out upon the ocean from the beach from a different point of view. While they are safe, they are also changed and it is something difficult to express but easy to understand. It is also important to note that the intense relationship man has with nature and each other. These men are in a most desperate circumstance and they have no way of escaping the reality of nature nor do they have the option of leaving each other's company. They have no choice but to face the extreme of whatever comes their way. They are nothing but small specs on the ocean and Crane realizes that nature is not preferential when it comes to humanity. Instead, it is random, casting arbitrary experiences in man's way with no care or concern for the outcomes. This is life and this is how life treats us - without regard and with little concern whatsoever. These notions coupled with the real-life story that Crane offers to us provide a perfect example of fictional reality. Stephen Crane's short story, "The Open Boat," is a classic example of how art does indeed represent art. The story incorporates experiences from real life to make a fictionalized story that is real and undoubtedly believable. It should be noted that because we know the fact of the story before reading the story, our perception of the story is changed because we know it is real. It is the same phenomenon that occurs when our behavior changes as soon as we know we are being filmed. The reality of the situation changes our perception of it. Crane's story is real and it reinforces the realism characteristics that were already in play when this story was published. Interestingly, the story is quite timely today considering the reality television world in which we live. This story would be a huge success if it were part of a television series in which contestants had to survive. Real life, real drama, and real emotions are what we get from this story and that aspect is only intensified when we know that the story is true. We cannot turn our eyes away from this part of the story and that is why realism becomes such an important factor in considering fiction. Works Cited Bender, Bert. "The Nature and Significance of 'Experience' in 'The Open Boat.'" The Midwest Quarterly. GALE Resource Database. Site Accessed July 27, 2008. Crane, Stephen. "The Open Boat." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. R. V. Cassill, ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 1981. Johnson, Glen. "Crane's Open Boat." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 78: American Short-Story Writers. GALE Resource Database. Site Accessed July 27, 2008. Metzger, Charles."The Open Boat." The Midwest Quarterly. GALE Resource Database. Site Accessed July 24, 2008. http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com "The Nature and Significance of 'Experience' in 'The Open Boat'" Critic: Bert Bender Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 2 (spring 1979): 70-80. Criticism about: "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), also known as: Stephen Townley Crane, Johnston Smith, Stephen (Townley) Crane, Stephen Crane Nationality: American [(essay date spring 1979) In the following essay, Bender investigates the religious overtones of the concept of personal experience in "The Open Boat."] It is an eye-opening experience for most readers when they learn that "The Open Boat" is based on Stephen Crane's own harrowing experience. And there is no question that what happened at sea on those January days of 1897 opened the author's own eyes; he would not forget it, even on his death-bed, where he murmured deliriously about changing places in an open boat.1 In the famous newspaper report of the incident, he indicated that he would take time in writing his story; his problem would be how to communicate the significance of so shaking an experience to an audience whose inexperience in such matters would necessarily distance them from his drama. "In a ten-foot dinghy," he writes early in the story, "one can get an idea of the resources of the sea ... that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy."2 This simple truth regarding the chasm between experience and inexperience is unwittingly reiterated by critics and students who continue to reject "The Open Boat" on grounds that it isn't realistic--for example, the student who can't believe that the men would have waited so long to brave the breakers, or the critic who complains that Crane failed "to achieve circumstantial verisimilitude."3 Anticipating such complaints, and understanding their basis, Crane shaped his story in ways that not only emphasize the enormous personal significance of his experience, but that render the very concept of "experience" more complex and vitally central to the story than has yet been recognized. For now, let me merely suggest, and explain later, that the full significance of "experience" in "The Open Boat" can be glimpsed if we see that the story dramatizes a variety of what William James would call (a few years after Crane's death) "Religious Experience." "Fact" and "Experience" in the story's subtitle ("A Tale Intended to be after the Fact: Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore") clearly signal that Crane is writing about an actual experience. It is not so obvious, however, that he begins at once to delimit the meaning of "experience," in an effort, perhaps, to distinguish his narrative from popular adventure stories. The story's first sentence, "None of them knew the color of the sky," prepares--as many have sensed--for the spiritual nature of the following journey, one in which there will be considerable scanning of the heavens. But we should also note that this first statement, along with "all of them knew the colors of the sea" (in the third sentence), plays upon the primary sense of "to know" as "to perceive" or "to experience." That is, these first sentences extend the subtitle's emphasis on "experience" by establishing the story's crucial linking and limiting of what is "known" to what is "experienced." This special narrative definition of "to know" is essential for Crane's purposes in "The Open Boat," but it is also necessary, in part, since he writes in English; for in our language, the single word "know" has two main senses which in French or German, for example, are reflected in the different words connaitre and savoir or kennen and wissen. Quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica, the OED notes that the word "know" is considered by some to have "two main meanings: 'to know may mean to perceive or apprehend, or it may mean to understand and comprehend. ... Thus a blind man, who cannot know about light in the first sense, may know about light in the second, if he studies a treatise on optics.'" Accordingly, the OED's first sense for "know" is "to perceive (a thing or person) as identical with one perceived before ... ; to identify." Its second sense is "to be acquainted with; to be familiar with by experience or through information or report" (as in connaitre or kennen); and its third sense is "to have cognizance of through observation, inquiry, or information" (as in savoir or wissen). Throughout "The Open Boat" Crane uses "know" in a way that excludes the OED's third sense of the word. From the first sentence to the last, he systematically denies his men the sort of verifiable knowledge that "cognizance," "observation," or "inquiry" imply. Instead, he makes them confront what we normally think of as the unknown or unknowable--as when they attain a "new ignorance of the grave-edge" (p. 335)--and leaves them only with the kind of knowledge that we refer to in such expressions as "I have known sorrow," i.e., "I have felt or experienced sorrow." The story's path to this sort of knowledge is easily traced: it begins with the curious formulation about knowing colors, and leads the correspondent to the moment when, having felt nature's cold indifference to his pleas, he can come to "know" "the pathos of his situation" (p. 353). In bringing together "know" and "pathos" in this crucial moment, Crane underscores the meaning of "experience" in "The Open Boat": as "to know" carries the primary sense "to experience," so does "pathos," whose root extends to the Greek paschein, "to experience, suffer." Like Gloucester and King Lear, Crane's correspondent comes to "see feelingly." Thus, having heard "the great sea's voice" (at the end of the story), he and the other survivors "felt that they could then be interpreters" (my emphasis). If what I am saying about "know" and "experience" seems to belabor the obvious, I must report that, unfortunately, many interpreters of "The Open Boat" lose touch with the story in its opening moments by failing to follow Crane's lead. Joseph X. Brennan, for example, misrepresents the story and Crane's view of experience when--in writing about the story's "artistic defects"--he points to the "successive intellectual and psychological steps" Crane's men take and concludes that "in Crane's view evidently no valid insight or awareness ... can be derived from human experience."4 On the contrary, Crane means to dramatize that the only kind of valid knowledge is experience, as he defines these terms in his story. And Donna Gerstenberger loses Crane when, in writing about the story's "epistemological emphasis," she argues that "The word knew in the famous first sentence is the key word, for the story which follows is about man's limited capacities for knowing reality."5 Again, this kind of interpretation fails to follow Crane as he leads his correspondent to the ultimate knowledge of reality--the kind of knowledge one feels and clings to in the face of death, as the dying Crane did in murmuring about changing places in an open boat, or the kind of knowledge one derives from what William James called a "religious experience." Whether Crane consciously played upon the etymological link between "pathos" and "experience" in "The Open Boat," it is impossible to tell. But, clearly, he sought to record the sort of experience that William James would describe in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James included all of his varieties of religious experience under the general definition of "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine";6 and he defined "divine" as that "primal reality" that "the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest" (p. 38). Such experiences, James was "almost appalled" to discover, involved much "sentimentality" and "emotionality," and he realized that "in all these matters of sentiment one must have 'been there' one's self in order to understand them" (pp. 486, 325). More specifically, what happened to Crane after the Commodore sank showed him "the religious values inherent in actual experience" that John Dewey would write of in A Common Faith (1934).7 Dewey's point is that "whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious, not that religion is something that introduces it"; thus he claims that institutionalized religion with its emphasis on the supernatural "stands in the way of the realization of distinctly religious values inherent in natural experience" (pp. 9, 24, 28). And he concludes--almost as though he had "The Open Boat" in mind--that, "Whether or not we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite." (p. 85). In attempting to dramatize what we may call a Jamesian experience, Crane began his story, as I have suggested, by stressing the actualness of his experience and by linking "knowledge" with "experience." His next step was carefully to depict, in his characterization of Captain Murphy, an heroic figure who embodies religious values that derive directly from actual experience. Throughout the story, Crane emphasizes that the captain steadies the men with his constant calmness and serenity. Speaking of the "personal and heartfelt" quality in the captain's voice, and of the men's obedience to him, Crane tells us that "after this devotion to the commander of the boat, 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" (p. 344). The captain will become an object of devotion, and the terms with which Crane understands the captain's heroism are indicated in his initial portrait. Crane sets it off from the others' portraits by placing it last, by making it longer and more detailed than the others, and by rendering it in sounded, rhythmic language: The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy-nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he command for a day or a decade; and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a topmast with a white ball on it, that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down, Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and a quality beyond oration or tears. (p. 340) This is memorably poetic prose, as many have noted, and it clearly conveys how strongly Crane felt about the captain. But I want most to indicate here that Crane's terms for depicting the captain's heroic embodiment of religious values are (1) that he is already injured, (2) that his "mind is rooted deeply in the timbers" of his vessel, and (3) that he is moved to deep mourning by having witnessed the suffering on the "seven turned faces" (of the men who, actually, went down with the Commodore). By virtue of his injury, he has suffered or "experienced." And his suffering for others, his resulting deep mourning that is "beyond oration or tears," is distinctly different from the correspondent's repeated useless ragings to an empty sky about "the seven mad gods who rule the sea." The captain is moved not by seven imagined mad gods, but by the faces of seven suffering men. The correspondent will eventually experience this sort of feeling, but only after his dark night alone: Crane's remark about the captain, "Thereafter there was something strange in his voice" (p. 340), parallels his later remark about the correspondent, "Thereafter he knew the pathos of his situation" (p. 353). But that the captain's mind is "rooted deep in the timbers" of his vessel, that he is deeply in touch with his actual situation, is perhaps his prime heroic characteristic. And it is this trait by which Crane dramatizes the difference between the captain and his men early in the story when they encounter some sea gulls. The gulls, with their staring, "black bead-like eyes," seemed "uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny, and the men hooted angrily at them." But when one attempts to land atop the captain's head, Crane uses the crisis to characterize the captain's steadying grasp of reality: 'Ugly brute,' said the oiler to the bird. 'You look as if you were made with a jacknife.' The cook and the correspondent swore darkly at the creature. The captain naturally wished to knock it away with the end of the heavy painter, but he did not dare do it, because anything resembling an emphatic gesture would have capsized this freighted boat; and so, with his open hand, the captain gently and carefully waved the gull away. After it had been discouraged from the pursuit the captain breathed easier on account of his hair, and the others breathed easier because the bird struck their minds at this time as being somehow gruesome and ominous. (p. 342) The captain is worried about his hair; his mind--unlike the others'--is not susceptible to fearful fantasies that might have caused the boat to capsize. Crane's point is that, at this early stage in his experience, the correspondent has a long way to go before he will be able to direct his own mind away from the empty sky and thereby come to know the pathos of his actual situation. Nor does the captain lose his grip even when faced with the possibility of his own death; he cooly accepts the likelihood of this inevitable reality, saying to the others, "If we don't all get ashore, ... I suppose you fellows know where to send news of my finish" They exchange the necessary information, and Crane again distinguishes the captain from the men by remarking that "there was a great deal of rage in" the "reflections of the men." Their raging is expressed as, "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" It is a formulation which, like a refrain, is thrice-repeated in Parts IV and VI, and ends here in its first instance in a flat denial of reality: "She cannot drown me" (P. 346). Despite his injury--perhaps even because of it, the experienced captain retains his heroic grasp on reality. At one point he literally teaches the men how to see the lighthouse: "'See it' said the captain. ... 'Look again, ... It's exactly in that direction.'" Crane's comment is that "It took an anxious eye to find a lighthouse so tiny" (p. 343). And even in the whirling surf, with "his face turned away from the shore" toward his men, the captain repeatedly calls, "Come to the boat!" In short, this selfless, experienced "iron man" to whom the men are so devoted exerts a growing influence over them that is most apparent in the "curiously ironbound friendship, the subtle brotherhood of men," that develops among them. In a very definite sense, Captain Murphy fathers this "subtle brotherhood." Partly because of the captain's influence, then, and partly because of their physical predicament, the men cease their fantastic ragings; and Crane gradually replaces the refrain, "If I am going to be drowned," with the simpler repeated notes about the prolonged rowing: "... the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And they also rowed"; "In the meantime the oiler rowed, and the correspondent rowed, and the oiler rowed," etc. (pp. 342, 347, 350). In this way he dramatically signals how the men's developing unity is based in simple, shared, physical experience. And he heightens the spiritual significance of this kind of experience by having the men touch each other, as well as by adding to the repeated notes of their rowing another note that will take on the effect of a refrain: "'Will you spell me for a while,' he said meekly." This part of the brotherhood, the meekly shared suffering, comes when one man is literally spent, as here, when the oiler, "blinded" by the "overpowering sleep," "rowed yet afterwards": "Then he touched a man in the bottom of the boat, and called his name" (p. 351). The intimate human proximity of these men in the boat contains the essence, I take it, of Dewey's "Common Faith," which I mentioned earlier. Crane's genius is that he can make what Dewey called the "infinite" "religious significance" of such a situation as finite as the experience of one human touching another. When he depicts these men huddling, touching each other for warmth (p. 351), he means to dramatize the physical reality of the spiritual fact: "The subtle brotherhood of men" "dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him" (p. 343). It is worth pausing here to note that the religious quality of Crane's "brotherhood" should be located squarely within the American tradition, as I have suggested by referring to William James and John Dewey. And it should be clear that the values inherent in his "brotherhood" are scarcely new. One needn't arrive at what is essential in Crane by way of the existential values represented in "Camus' heroes," for example, even though the comparison has been eloquently made.8 The values dramatized in "The Open Boat" have been realized in similar terms by the greatest writers in our literature--by Melville, for example, in "A Squeeze of the Hand" in Moby-Dick; and by Whitman in Chant Three of "I Sing the Body Electric." There, Whitman begins, "I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons"; and he goes on to develop the image of a vigorous, calm, experienced man like Crane's Captain Murphy. Whitman ends the Chant by imaging the old man sailing his own boat: "You would wish long and long to be with him, and would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other." But Crane's deepest feelings about "experience"--as rendered in "The Open Boat"--entail much more than an intimate brotherhood; he invites us to follow him more deeply as he speculates upon the subjective nature of such experiences. Even the correspondent's exposure to the chilling actualities of survival at sea, and the experienced captain's influence upon him do not, of themselves, develop in the correspondent a deep sense of the significance of his experience. This kind of awareness begins to come to him only in Part VI when--after having spent a dark night alone that helps him sense nature's indifference to him--he comes to know "the pathos of his situation." At this point, he has a vision that comes to him through poetry: "To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent's head" (p. 353). This small scene constitutes the story's intense lyric center, its epiphany. The verse (about "A soldier of the Legion [who] lay dying in Algiers," which Crane took from Caroline, Lady Norton's "Bingen") and the use Crane makes of it here have been criticized as "patently sentimental and banal."9 On the contrary, however, the correspondent's vision of the dying soldier has all the characteristics of a Jamesian "religious experience" (it occurs in the correspondent's solitude, it is full of sentiment and emotion, and it provokes in him a grave and solemn response). And, since it introduces "genuine perspective" for the correspondent, it is clearly the sort of moment that John Dewey would have called "religious." The correspondent's new perspective is simply, but profoundly, that he--"who had been taught to be cynical of men"--has come to see the suffering of another man as a "human, living thing ... it was an actuality--stern, mournful, and fine" (p. 353). When Crane writes that the correspondent "plainly saw" the soldier and, finally, that he "was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension," it is clear that the correspondent has come in his own mysterious way to imitate the Captain's most impressive power--empathy--as indicated (after he had seen the seven faces of his drowning men) by that "something strange in his voice" that was "deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears." But Crane's investigations into the nature of "experience" do not end even here. Already, in telling the story of his own most memorable experience, he has (1) dramatically linked "know" with "experience" and "pathos"; (2) created a hero, the captain, and associated his compassion with his mind's deep connection with actual experience; (3) created a correspondent whose cynicism is associated with his inexperience; (4) implied that the correspondent's present experience in the dinghy has in some way helped to prepare him for a religious experience, his vision; (5) associated the correspondent's most profound moment not with actual experience, alone, but with mystery, emotion, and poetry; and (6) given us a story whose aesthetic derives from the correspondent's visionary experience or "epiphany." He goes further, however, to incorporate into his story yet another dimension of experience--that of the reading experience. To begin, he was keenly aware that the "mind unused to the sea" would be unprepared to grasp even simple realities that he wished to depict (p. 347). And he knew that a writer's efforts to convey larger realities would be even more difficult. As another of his correspondents exclaimed, "we can never tell life, one to another" (my emphasis).10 Crane was aware of this difficulty well before "The Open Boat"; thus he had developed his unique poetic style--his own way of expressing the emotional and psychological realities inherent in his material. But further, he had come to sense that what was true of even the most dramatic physical experience--that its significance might be comprehended only by some mystic sense--was also true of the reading experience. He knew, that is, that even the power of poetry is unaccountably lost on some readers at the same time that it deeply affects others. As early as Maggie (1893), for example, he had sensed that the reading experience is mysteriously subjective. There, in a scene that strangely foreshadows the problems he would later confront self-consciously in "The Open Boat," he has a woman in a Bowery beerhall "sing a sorrowful lay, whose lines told of a mother's love, and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost at sea under harrowing circumstances." The young writer's interest, however, is not in the song, but in the response it gets: "From the faces of a score or so in the crowd, the self-contained look faded. Many heads were bent forward with eagerness and sympathy."11 In their capacity to lose their "self-contained" looks in response to a song, the "score or so" in this Bowery crowd seem to possess instinctively the mystic sense that finally comes unaccountably to the correspondent in "The Open Boat." In "The Open Boat," however, Crane looks more closely at this phenomenon, for it had become vitally connected with his investigations into the nature of experience. He therefore dramatized it at work at the very heart of his story: he is fascinated with how the correspondent--whose "profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension" comes to him through recollected poetry--had earlier in his life been completely unmoved by the same lines. By now, "he had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse," even though in his childhood "myriads of his school fellows had informed him of the soldier's plight." Their "dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers." One of Crane's subtlest touches in "The Open Boat" is to challenge his readers to respond more humanly than he had, to make it their affair that four men struggled to survive at sea in an open boat. Yet even as he parodied himself and challenged his readers, he was aware of the mystery. As Crane proved in writing The Red Badge of Courage, firsthand experience of dramatic and tragic events is not the essential material from which art may be created. A writer can give us compelling dramas of human tragedy only after he has found within himself that mysterious empathetic power to sense the essential dramatic and tragic nature inherent in ordinary experience, to come to know "the pathos of his situation." And the sensitive reader--as Crane saw in writing "The Open Boat"--must possess a similar empathetic power. His faith was that, if he could reach us at all, it would be as the correspondent had come to see and know another man's suffering--through the mystery of poetic experience. In his awareness of the mysterious complexities of experience in general and of the reading experience, in particular, as well as in the values embodied in his "subtle brotherhood of men," Crane might be compared with Herman Melville, who had accounted for Hawthorne's power to reach readers by resorting to religious and mystical terms quite like Crane's in "The Open Boat." Melville could account for the "shock of recognition" (whereby a reader senses a writer's genius) only by clinging "to the strange fancy that, in all men, hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties" that make them capable of experiencing the shock of recognizing genius.12 And like Crane, who imagined ideally responsive readers, Melville called for Hawthorne's books to be "read by the million" even though he knew that they could be "admired" only by those who were "capable of admiration" (my emphasis, p. 204). The mystical terms with which Melville accounts for genius and the deepest kind of literary response will strike many as impossibly romantic. Still, his "shock of recognition" has its hold on our imagination. And our best contemporary efforts to understand the phenomenon of literary response scarcely improve upon Melville's. Norman Holland, for example, has concluded that the act of reading requires something like the writer's genius. The act of literary "perception is also an act of creation in which I partake of the artist's gift," he says; and he finds in himself "what Freud called the writer's 'innermost secret; the essential ars poetica,' that is, the ability to break through the repulsion associated with 'the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.'" His Freudian terms bring him to the same view of "experiencing [in general and, specifically, in literature] as an in-gathering and in-mixing of self and other as described by Whitehead or Bradley or Dewey or Cassirer or Langer or Husserl."13 To this list we might add at least Crane and Melville. Yet, in finally addressing himself to that most troublesome question in subjective literary theory--of just how a reader is moved or affected, Holland concludes that "there is no satisfactory theory of affect in any circumstances, real life, literary response, dreams, or inner tension."14 Any formal attempt to analyze affect will confront "the notorious difficulty of using words (instead of mathematics) in formal systems and also of using words to describe feelings. At that crux, a psychology of literary response might turn not to psychology, but to poetry" (p. 299). Or, we might add, to a psychology like William James's that recognizes the mystical experience; for the deep, personal response in reading--like the correspondent's "profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension"--transcends the self. Stephen Crane pondered such questions in "The Open Boat," where, attempting to comprehend "the best experience of his life" and to convey its import, he turned to the poetry of religious experience. Even as he turned to poetry, however, he realized that many of his readers and critics would be capable only of viewing his story "from a balcony" (p. 341). Even the unlikely reader who had suffered similar experiences at sea might not yet have had that kind of rare inner experience that finally enabled the correspondent to recognize what Melville might have called his own genius.15 Source: Bert Bender, "The Nature and Significance of 'Experience' in 'The Open Boat'." The Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 2 (spring 1979): 70-80. Gale Resource Database. "Realistic Devices in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat'" Critic: Charles R. Metzger Source: The Midwest Quarterly 4, no. 1 (October 1962): 47-54. Criticism about: "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), also known as: Stephen Townley Crane, Johnston Smith, Stephen (Townley) Crane, Stephen Crane Nationality: American [(essay date October 1962) In the following essay, Metzger examines the realistic elements in "The Open Boat."] There is some argument among critics over the question of whether Stephen Crane's fiction is classically realistic or classically naturalistic. Accepting the working definition of naturalism as pessimistic realism, we can, if we wish, turn from the critic's argument over whether Crane is a realistic writer or a naturalistic one to consideration of realistic elements in his writing, leaving to others the determination of whether or not the total impression of his writing or of each single work is pessimistic or neutral or something else still. There is much to be said for discussing realistic or romantic or naturalistic "elements" in the writing of a given author rather than discussing the author as a "romantic," or a "naturalist" or a "realist." By discussing certain elements in a writer's work we expose ourselves less to the disappointment that attends having put one kind of label on an author, only to find that it doesn't adhere properly in all places. We expose ourselves less to the embarrassment that follows having labelled an author according to one category, only to discover in his writings features that belong equally, sometimes exclusively, to another category. In limiting ourselves initially to the consideration of elements or features, we are better prepared to live in a world where it is unavoidably apparent that even the most wildly romantic pieces of fiction (such as "Gawain and the Green Knight" and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) have features that are clearly recognizable as realistic; we are better prepared to live in a world in which even the most sternly realistic pieces of fiction (such as Silas Marner and An American Tragedy) betray features that are clearly recognizable as unrealistic and therefore presumably romantic. We are better prepared to face up to the possibility that perhaps all predominately realistic kinds of fiction, that all so-called "realistic" points of view, are partially romantic--insofar as these are based upon assumptions, upon guesses, upon hopes. I should like, in this connection, to propose for consideration the suggestion that writers and critics who are primarily concerned with realism assume, with varying degrees of consistency, three things: 1) that there is a real world (independent of man's knowledge) 2) that it is possible to know this world, and 3) that it is possible to write about it accurately in fiction. As philosophers are quick to tell us, all three of these assumptions are challengeable, and possess accordingly some of the qualities of make-believe. The writers of predominantly realistic fiction and the critics who celebrate such fiction assume, quite rightly, I believe, that it is possible in fiction to present works that correspond with, that represent, things as they really are. These persons usually assert that the privilege as well as the duty of the writer of fiction is therefore to present things as they really are. The rather staggering question that follows immediately from such an assertion is: How are things The answers to this question, needless to say, are various. The religious mystic's version of how things are is likely to be quite different from the civil engineer's. As applied to literature, however, most answers to this staggering question are made practically, rather than theoretically, and show up as fairly simple attitudes and judgments. In effect people are inclined to conclude that a piece of writing is realistic when they can see in it some correspondence between the experiences which are presented to them as fiction, and real-life experiences which they themselves have had (either directly as action or indirectly through reading, etc.). Recognizing the danger inherent in such an attitude toward fiction (the danger of discovering that any piece of fiction may qualify momentarily as realistic in these terms) some critics following I. A. Richards have labeled this recognition of correspondences "mnemonic irrelevancy" and have ruled it out of the critic's canon. I should prefer not to rule it out at all. Rather I should suggest that memory is hardly ever totally irrelevant. One does not have to have been on the open sea in a ten-foot dingey to recognize the veracity of Crane's treatment of his material, but it helps. It helps even to have talked to persons who have had such experiences; it helps to have read about the sea; it helps to have rented a rowboat for an hour's row; it helps to have seen the surf at the ocean shore. People are inclined also to conclude that a piece of fiction is realistic when they recognize in it some correspondence with their own views of life--with their own favorite generalizations, their own theories, their own beliefs, their own myths and fantasies. The nightmarish fiction of Franz Kafka can therefore be judged highly realistic by anyone who has had or can imagine having the hallucinatory experiences he described and who has accepted or can admit the possibility of accepting the conclusions about life which Kafka's fiction suggests. My principal concern here is not (fortunately) with discussing the many varieties of human experience, nor the various theories man has advanced in attempting to explain to himself how things really are. It is rather--having recognized that human experiences and that theories about how things really are are broadly various--to go on to consider some of the technical devices, some of the things a writer can do, in this case some of the things Stephen Crane has done, that increase the probability that the reader will conclude that the author's presentation of his material is realistic. One of the most obvious things that a writer can do to make his writing seem true to life is to introduce a considerable amount of factual detail. In "The Open Boat" Stephen Crane does exactly this. He is able to introduce a great deal of factual detail largely because he has chosen to tell the story of "The Open Boat" through the person of an "invisible" character that we might call the omniscient narrator. The omniscient narrator can introduce the other characters; he can tell us facts that the characters do not know; he can tell us facts that we do not know and that the characters would not mention in dialogue simply because they know them so well. The narrator can announce for our benefit certain generalizations that will either explain action that follows or summarize action that has already occurred. The omniscient narrator, once he has introduced us to the scene, can be silent and let us overhear conversation, let us learn facts, opinions, etc., from the characters themselves. Being omniscient, the narrator can know what is going on in the mind of a particular character--what he is thinking--as is the case with Crane's reporter in "The Open Boat," and he can even allow us to "overhear" such interior monologues. The danger that attends using an omniscient narrator in order to present large quantities and varieties of factual information to the reader is that this narrator may get in the way of the action; he may impede it by volunteering too many facts, too many opinions. Stephen Crane reduces this danger by doing several things. He limits the amount of factual detail or commentary that is introduced--altogether and at any given time. He does not introduce factual detail that the reader doesn't really need to know. He doesn't tell us the name of the ship that sank; he doesn't tell us the Captain's name or the color of the dingey. He does not try to introduce the factual detail he does present all at the same time and he does not introduce all of it through the narrator; he introduces some of it through dialogue. We learn that the oiler's name is Billie by hearing the Captain address him by name. We learn the crucial difference between a house of refuge and a lifesaving station by overhearing an argument between the cook and the correspondent. By the time the narrator tells us there is no lifesaving station within twenty miles of the dingey, we have already learned what a lifesaving station is. Crane is careful not only in restricting his presentation of facts to those that will prepare for or validate action, but he is careful also to present facts in terms of appropriate perspectives. In announcing at the beginning of the story that "None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes ... were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them," he suggests to the reader those facts that would be significant to persons in the situation being described. A person in a small boat threatened by every wave is going to be looking at the waves. Later on in the story Crane repeats the same kind of assertion in a slightly different way. He indicates the approach of dawn by describing a change observable in the color of the waves. Crane also introduces facts to his characters (and hence to the reader) in versions of the ways in which we apprehend facts in real life. In the scene where the correspondent (who is rowing) sees the shark, the word shark is not used until after the evidence that would lead a person to conclude that he had seen and heard a shark has been presented: the correspondent is described as hearing the tearing sound (of the shark's fin cutting the surface of the water), as seeing the phosphorescent flash, as seeing the fin itself. All of these events are described and repeated before the word shark is ever introduced. In real life, when an experience is unanticipated, we have it first; then assign the words to it that give it discursive meaning. Conversely, as in the sighting of the house of refuge in this story, we sometimes are able to perceive things that we would not otherwise notice, or perceive them earlier than we would otherwise, because we have them, or the word for them, in mind. Crane's short story appears realistic to us, his characters seem believable, not only because he presents us with a large number of relevant facts apprehended by the characters and by ourselves in versions of the ways that we apprehend facts in real life; but also, because he allows for, because he presents in his story, multiple perspectives, multiple interpretations, and the commission and correction of error. The correspondent does not know for example that anyone but himself has seen the shark, until the captain mentions that he saw it too. The characters in the boat do not know that there is not a lifesaving station within twenty miles; but they are able, by checking their interpretations of what they see and by correcting for error, to determine that the "lifeboat" on the beach is not a lifeboat, but an omnibus, that the man who appears running, but seems to be going too fast, and with an awkward posture, is actually riding a bicycle. Crane also allows (as in the case of the omnibus) his characters to interpret the things they see hopefully; then he allows them to realize the less hopeful but more accurate interpretation; and then he allows them to be angry. He has his characters do this repeatedly, as we readers do the same things repeatedly in real life. A word now about repetition, which is a very common and a very effective device for making a fact or an event in fiction seem real. There are actually two main kinds of repetition. The first kind is sometimes called preparation and involves mentioning one or more times the possibility that something is likely to happen (in "The Open Boat" the repeated suggestion that the boat will probably swamp, that somebody is likely to be drowned, etc.). Later on in the story when the event actually takes place it seems credible; it seems real to the reader because he has been prepared for its happening by having been told that it might. Most readers don't notice on the first reading of a piece of fiction that they are being "prepared." They forget in their conscious minds what they have been told. The fact that subconsciously many readers remember what they have been told about action that may transpire, makes the action seem real to them when it finally is presented. Another kind of repetition, one of which the reader is usually quite conscious, is akin to the refrain used in poetry. Crane's refrain in "The Open Boat" that begins "If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned," is of this sort. Yet even as a refrain that is repeated grossly, it is psychologically defensible since it reminds the reader of those thoughts in real life that often occur to him repeatedly and over which he has a minimum amount of control, since those thoughts are occasioned by his experience and are expressions of his anxiety in relation to that experience. Even the apparently irrational recollection by the correspondent of the poem memorized in childhood about "the soldier of the Legion dying in Algiers" is of this same sort; for the topic of dying--the meaning of the poem memorized in childhood but not understood until the presence of death has been made real by experience--pervades the whole story--and the poem as fact has the same relevance as any other of the facts presented, only ironically so. Irony is a device often used by "realistic" writers (even as it is used by Crane) to create the illusion of reality. In one sense irony can be viewed as a special version of multiple perspective. It involves a double or contrasting view of events--a contrast usually stated as opposites, between what is expected and what happens, between illusion and reality, between what man would prefer and what he gets. In some respects irony is one of the weakest of realistic devices, because it is so easy. One of the easiest things in the world to do is to point out the contrast between a particular view of the world (i. e., that nature is our home, our permissive and gentle parent) and the facts (namely that the wind, the sea and the tides do not care about us). When irony is given a broader statistical base, when the writer suggests that his characters do not get exactly the opposite of what they expect or want, but merely something different; when irony is expanded to become chance, it is a stronger device. Notice, for example, that it is not the cook who is wearing the life jacket who drowns. It is the oiler, who, however, is portrayed as a strong swimmer. Despite the weakness of what amounts to occasional gross irony, "The Open Boat" is a very realistic piece of writing; and it is so because the facts presented, the perspectives employed, the contrasts stated are all joined in the work to describe not only some impressive facts of life, but also to demonstrate some defensible generalizations, not only about human experience, but also about how that experience is apprehended and how, when it is apprehended, we react to it. Source: Charles R. Metzger, "Realistic Devices in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat'." The Midwest Quarterly 4, no. 1 (October 1962): 47-54. Source Database: GALE Literature Resource Center Tales of Adventure Critic: Bettina L. Knapp Source: Stephen Crane, Ungar Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 145-62. Reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 4 Criticism about: Stephen (townley) Crane (1871-1900), also known as: Stephen (Townley) Crane, Stephen Townley Crane, Johnston Smith Nationality: American [In the following excerpt, Knapp commends The Open Boat as a great piece of short fiction and a compelling narrative of struggle between individuals and the indifferent, vast natural world.] The Open Boat (1898), one of America's finest short stories, describes the adventure that safisfied Crane perhaps most fully. He said once that he wanted to go to some quarter of the world where mail is uncertain. He did just that when he accepted Bacheller's assignment in November, 1896 to cover the Cuban Revolution. Thick fog enshrouded the St. Johns River as the Commodore set sail from Jacksonville with Crane aboard. Although Captain Edwin Murphy had taken the precaution of hiring a local pilot to help the vessel out of the harbor, it stock a sand bar. The following morning, the Commodore was towed free, but Murpy neglected to view the damage done the ship, which continued on into deeper waters. By the time the leak was discovered, there was no hope of saving the ship. Although the Captain tried to steer it back to the harbor, the pumps and engines gave out and it foundered. Passengers and crew were ordered into the lifeboats. Crane's conduct during this harrowing ordeal was superb: he soothed frightened men, helped bail out water, and acted like a born sailor. After the crew was in the lifeboats, Crane, the Captain, the cook and the oiler climbed into a ten-foot-long dinghy. Although the boat managed to stay afloat on the high seas, Crane's harrowing experience was far from over. The mate's lifeboat capsized and the men on it drowned. Crane was deeply moved by the courage of the sailors who drowned: no shrieks, no groans, only silence. The remaining lifeboats reached land the following day. The dinghy, however, could not get ashore because of the rough surf and so remained out at sea. No one on shore could see or hear the men in the dinghy. The captain fired his pistol but to no avail, and the men were forced to spend another night in the dinghy, rowing frantically to prevent being swallowed up by the rough seas. They then decided to row to Daytona Beach and try to make it through the breakers there. But the boat overturned, and they had to swim. A man on the beach saw what happened and ran for help. All but the oiler were saved. None of them knew the color of the sky, is perhaps one of the most celebrated opening lines of any short story. The opening line conveys the fierce struggle between finite man and the infinitude that engulfs himas in Melville's Moby-Dick. The sea for Crane, as it is for Melville, is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life. The men's agony at not knowing their fate is underscored by the power of those surging waters waves that could sweep the men under at any moment. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Man, like the helpless survivors in the boat, is thrust here and there and floats about in utter helplessness. No matter how hard people try to fix and direct themselves, they are castaways. Salvationif there is onelies in the bonds between men that assuage their implacable solitude. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Crane's use of changing rhythms throughout the tale points up the terror of the dinghy's passengers and exemplifies the utter senselessness of existence itself. Crane suggests that if an observer were to look upon the events objectively, viewing them from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and even if they had had leisure, there were other things to occupy their minds. Values of virtue, bravery, integrity were once of importance, but now are meaningless in a godless universe where nature observes impassively human despair and frustration. Yet, the harrowing sea journey creates a new morality, which gives fresh meaning to life: the brotherhood of men ... was 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. Comfort and feelings of well-being emerge as each helps the other assuage his growing terror. In the midst of fear and harrowing terror, there is also irony and humor: If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif 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 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. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd.... But, no, she cannot mean to drown me. Not after all this work. A mystical relationship exists between the men in the dinghyand the sea and heavens. Crane feels compelled to point out man's smallness, to set him back into nature and reduce him to size. Conversations between the oiler and the cook, seemingly trivial, since they revolve around food What kind of pie do you like bestserve in reality to point out the absurdity of humankind's preoccupations. They also act as a way of dispelling progressive terror. As for the captain, he is ridiculed; the men laugh at him, again distracting themselves from their great fear of death. The sight of a shark heightens the men's dreadful tension. Crane does not mention the shark by name, but the reader can almost hear the shark's fin cut the water's surface and see its phosphorescent gleaming body. Like the survivors of Raft of the Medusa, whose harrowing episode is famous in French maritime history, the men in the dinghy do not know there is a lifesaving station twenty miles away. When the ordeal is over, the men, safely on land, look back at the water: white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters. The narrator's voice withdraws, as it were, from the chaotic drama, introducing a sense of spatial and temporal distance. Comfortable on land, the narrator can indulge in the luxury of waxing poetic and thus transform subjective emotions into a work of art. Its poetry and rhythmic schemes make The Open Boat the match of Melville's White Jacket and the best of Jack London and Joseph Conrad. This tale's unusually punctuated sentences of contrasting length simulate the heart beat of man under extreme stress, producing an incantatory quality. Crane's sensual images of man struggling against the sea remain vivid long after the reading of The Open Boat. The salt spray and deafening roar of the waves pounding against the dinghy can almost be tasted and heard.... Source: Bettina L. Knapp, Tales of Adventure, in Stephen Crane, Ungar Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 145-62. Reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 4. Source Database: GALE Literature Resource Center Read More