"The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat"
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Stephen Crane's stories "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat" have many similarities. Each story involves a small group of men who are in an isolated situation that is fraught with danger and eventually results in the death of one of the men. But their strongest similarities are their bitterly ironic endings. In both cases the truth that is revealed by the ending counteracts assumptions that had guided the thought of the stories' participants. In "The Blue Hotel," the men assume that they live in a civilized place that is nothing like the imaginings of the crazed Swede. The death of the Swede is seen, accordingly, as purely the result of his own maniacal behavior. Yet, as the coda reveals, everything the Swede feared was true. The men in the open boat question the existence of god and the meaning of life as they struggle to save themselves from drowning. They wonder why they should be taunted by the possibility of living if they were only going to die. This questions the very basis of any possible meaning to life. Yet when they are being rescued life suddenly seems to have redeemed itself and confirmed its meaningfulness. But, in the last moments, its absurdity is reconfirmed. In "The Blue Hotel" a Swede is one of the visitors who is taken in by Scully, the owner of a hotel in a western town. It quickly becomes apparent that the Swede is subject to "paranoid delusions of persecution" (Weiss 161). He behaves in a nervous manner and remarks to Johnnie Scully, the
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Cowboy's desire to provoke more violence, the gambler's knife--make up the sort of raw, untamed violence that the Swede was looking for. The irony is that until the Easterner examined his own fear of this violence no one questions their claims to being civilized and above such things.
In "The Open Boat" four men, the captain, the cook, the correspondent, and the oiler, are adrift in a boat following a shipwreck. They attempt to row it toward the invisible shore. But they are somewhat uncertain about the location of any aid station or lighthouse and can only go in the direction of the Florida coast hoping that they will approach the land at a point where they will be seen and rescued. When they are not rescued they are forced to abandon the boat and attempt to swim through the rough surf. A man arrives to help them out, but the oiler is killed in his struggle to reach the shore.
Throughout the long days and nights in the boat the oiler and the correspondent are the ones who must take turns rowing. The constant switching off, as they take turns rowing and sleeping in the cold water at the bottom of the boat, establishes a kind of equivalence between them. Together they embody the central struggle of endless watchfulness a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2118
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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