Crane's Short Story The Open Boat

The following essay maintains as its thesis that in the face of an often brutal and godless existence, Crane demonstrates in "The Open Boat" that the only source of psychological wholeness for human beings is to reach out toward others. I reviewed three articles on Steven Crane's "The Open Boat" from scholarly literary journals, including the Hemingway Review, Studies in Short Fiction, and College Literature. These articles focused on Crane's worldview evident in the story, something that helped reveal his theory of psychological wholeness. In my analysis I searched for information that provided greater insight into the author's personal psychology as illustrated by the characters and emotions in the story. The main conclusion I drew from this research is that Crane believed in a harsh and godless world, one where a commitment to other human beings represents the only chance for psychological wholeness.

The Stephen Crane short story "The Open Boat," is but one of the author's accounts of a personal trauma he suffered, being lost at sea on a lifeboat in January 1897 (Bates, 1998, p. 65). Through fiction, Crane fictionalizes a non-fictional episode from his own past. Because of this, "The Open Boat" readily lends itself to a psychological critique, for the authors personal psychology is clearly reflected in the story. The emotions and behavior of the men in the boat demonstrate the author's psychological perspective of "wholeness

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human existence struggles amidst a brutal and godless nature, we see that the emotions and behaviors of the men in the boat reveal Crane's belief that only fraternity or reaching out to others can provide psychological wholeness for the individual. We already see that there is no belief in some kind of spiritual fulfillment after life. As we are told, "I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be possible? Can it be possible? Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature" (Crane, YEAR, p. 739). Against the indifference of nature and the thought of their impending mortality, the men form a community on the boat, one where commitment to each other provides them psychological wholeness in the midst of trauma, "�distances were so magnificent in the dinghy that the rower was enabled to keep his feet partly warmed by thrusting them under his companions. Their legs indeed extended far under the rowing-seat until they touched the feet of the captain forward" (Crane, YEAR, 735). In this manner, the men on the boat literally form a human chain of brotherhood against the cruelties of nature and a godless existence. As Rath and Shaw (1991) assert, the "�four characters in the dinghy" are

Category: Literature - C