brotherhood and isolation

“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) became famous in the United States and England when he published his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) at the age of twenty-four. I feel inadequate. Within five years, however, he was dead of tuberculosis. I immediately feel better. In that five years, he published five novels, two volumes of poetry, and over 300 sketches, reports, and short stories. Oh, I feel inadequate again. His writings are among the most influential of the period.

Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child to Methodist minister in a very devout family. The family moved frequently, and as a result Crane was educated in many places: Pennington Seminary, Lafayette College, Claverack College (a military school where he attained the rank of Captain), and Syracuse University. In 1891, Crane moved to New York to become a journalist, where he lived in a community of struggling artists and medical students. These experiences helped shape his fiction, and led to his friendships with some of the best literary realists in America at the time. One of Crane’s key interests — the role of environment, especially extreme ones, in shaping character — emerged out of this period, and also out of his fascination with the work of Charles Darwin. He wrote a lot about the extreme environments of the world and as experiments in perception, his journalistic sketches anticipated the subjective “new journalism” of the 1960s.

Though his literature is based heavily in reality, Crane’s writing is more akin to an impressionistic painting than a realist one. He selects facts scrupulously without bombarding the reader, and defines his characters through vivid imagery and focused commentary. Though he wrote in this way about many topics, the Civil War stimulated much creativity for him, and he seems to have been uncannily capable of imagining the wartime experience. His intention is to shock readers with new and disturbing ideas and perceptions. All of this was coloured by a skepticism, developed from a young age, toward Christianity. Crane also wrote poetry, and his poems are experimental, unconventional, and cryptic; like his journalism, his poetry seems to foreshadow twentieth century literary traditions. Through it all, Crane travelled extensively, which fueled his literature but also likely contributed to his early death. Around 1898, Crane left American with his ladyfriend, Cora Taylor, who attempted to nurse him through his final illness. He had been tubercular since 1897 but made no attempts to seek treatment. They went to Greece, settled in England, and finally to a sanatorium in the Black Forest, Germany, where Crane succumbed to his illness on June 5, 1900.

“The Open Boat” was published in 1898, and is widely considered to be Crane’s best piece of work. It fuses together his interest in extreme environments with his interest in the internal male self. The story is based in his own experiences in a dinghy adrift at sea for thirty hours after the sinking of The Commodore (just before the Spanish-American War). The story explores the extent of human loneliness and examines the brotherhood of men who have been to sea together. It questions the limits of cosmic control in the face of human achievement, and of human achievement in the face of cosmic control. In the story, four men — a captain, a cook, an oiler, and a correspondent (who seems to be Crane) — have been in a shipwreck and are in a small rowboat seeking the shore. The oiler and the correspondent are sharing the rowing duties, the cook is keeping the boat bailed out, and the captain is directing the action from his makeshift sickbed, as he seems to been injured in the crash.

There are a few immutable messages that the story tries repeatedly to drive home for the audience, with the first being the importance of changeability and impermanence. The oiler, for example, repeatedly tells the other members of the company, “We’re not there yet.” He fears the group getting ahead of themselves, and seems concerned that looking ahead to rescue will make them forget the work it will take to get there. Interestingly, it is the oiler who never gets “there,” because he dies as they all swim for shore at the end of the story. The cautiousness he shows is headed by the correspondent, who paddles slowly towards shore and survives the journey — the oiler, conversely, even after the advice he has given throughout the story, takes off for the shore in haste but finds himself dead before he could arrive.

There is also a great deal of question in the story about the power of hope. All the men are simultaneously afraid to hope too hard, but unwilling to let hope go completely. Crane writes, “To express any particular optimism at this time they felt to be childish and stupid, but they all doubtless possessed this sense of the situation in their mind. When to hope is the question, and there is no real answer to it in this story. Throughout the text, the men are shown glimmers of hope followed by extended periods of trauma. This ties in with the message above about patience that the oiler tries to get across.

The passage of time is also crucial to this story, exemplified through the use of repetition by Crane. For example, “the oiler and correspondent rowed. And also they rowed.” This kind of repetition makes clear the massive amount of time that is passing and also the dreary monotony experienced by the men. This sense of unending time is also echoed in the bond that forms across the four men across the time of the text. The brotherhood of the sea that emerges speaks to the importance of trauma in the formation of male friendship; the men understand something about each other that no one else will, and therefore the friendship is understood.

The absurdity and uncertainty of fate is probably the biggest underlying message of the text. The men are consumed by the idea of fate. Would they be brought so close to shore only to die? Is it a cruel hand of fate that has brought them this far? This seems to be in keeping with Crane’s own suspicions and skepticism about Christianity — the correspondent especially is trying to make sense of his reality in the absence of anything concrete to hold on to. He wants God to act out of logic, but instead finds the actions to be arbitrary which is a source of great pain. Though the story is based on a true event, it also thusly becomes a metaphor for the ways in which we try to make sense of reality in the everyday world, and how we try to make sense of our actions and the actions of those around us. If we could believe that fate was fair and acted always in our best interests, life would be easier; so too would this journey be.