Rankings of Works of Literature

According to this criteria, I rank Crane's "The Open Boat" the best work of the five, followed in order by DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Adams' "Chaos," Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin," and, the "least good" piece, Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.

Crane's story is very clearly the most emotionally moving of the five works. It is the only piece of fiction of the five, and as such it "tells a story" in a way that the others do not. One of the purposes of a short story is to entertain and excite the emotions, especially when the story is about a small boat carrying four shipwrecked sailors in danger of drowning in stormy seas. The story is not only exciting in terms of not knowing the fate of these men, it is also mentally stimulating in the way it makes the reader think about his or her own life and imminent death.

The other four works are non-fiction, and they are all men

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eir own hard work (DuBois 758). This claim ignores the fact of whites' subjugation of blacks for centuries in slavery, and that whites owe blacks help in their recovery of rights. This angers DuBois and it angers the reader as he or she identifies with DuBois and the blacks who were slaves, were suddenly freed with no property, no education, and then told to lift themselves up their own bootstraps. This is even more emotionally upsetting when we remember that Washington is a black man telling other blacks to be quiet and don't ask for too much too soon. Now, let us return to Crane's story to compare it to DuBois' piece. We have seen already that in this reader's view Washington's piece is not as good as Crane's story because it does not affect the reader's emotions. We now see that Washington is deceptive even in the way he appeals to the mind of the reader. We have seen that DuBois' piece, on the other hand, appeals both to the mind and the emotions of the reader. Still, the greatest affect of DuBois' piece is on the mind. He stimulates the thinking processes of the reader as far as the reality of the Reconstruction Era goes. He engages the emotions, too, but not in the same way that Crane does. Crane's story engages both th
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Approximate Word count = 1737
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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