25 pages • 50 minutes read
Stephen CraneThe Open Boat
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1897A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Community and Cooperation Versus Alienation
The men on the boat represent a community, and Crane’s short story directly explores how the men work together to survive at sea. The correspondent and the oiler row the dinghy, the cook keeps water out of the boat, and the captain provides leadership and guidance. Each person has a specific role and contributes to the group. The men don’t acknowledge their community out loud, but the knowledge of it gives them strength.
The men’s “brotherhood” is partly a practical matter of “common safety” (219). If the four men fought and quarreled, they’d have a difficult time focusing on the task at hand: survival. Yet the theme goes beyond the precarious situation, as the narrator notes the bond between the men is “personal and heartfelt” (219); their cooperation stems from something deeper than the struggle to stay alive. The men do argue a couple of times, but their disagreements are minor because the men like and appreciate one another in a way that transcends the life-or-death situation.
At the same time, the men experience alienation. They’re separate from the rest of the people in the world. No one looks for them, and the people they spot at the resort don’t help. Alienation persists even when the man with the halo saves the men and the beach becomes “populated with men with blankets, clothes, and flasks, and women with coffeepots and all the remedies sacred to their minds” (239). The narrator doesn’t show the men bonding with the people on the beach: They pivot toward the haunting voice of the sea, which they now feel they can “interpret.”
However, given the correspondent’s realizations about nature’s indifference, this camaraderie with nature is likely an illusion. Meanwhile, the story refers to the oiler’s body simply as a “still and dripping shape” (239), denying it any shared humanity with the survivors and the people on the beach. This suggests that alienation—via death—is humans’ ultimate fate, but this only makes the need to forge connections in life more pressing. This is why, as he reflects on the danger he is in, the correspondent resolves to “mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea” (235).
People Versus Nature
“The Open Boat” is an adventure and a survival story about surviving the hazardous open ocean. The confrontation between humans and nature is a common theme in literature, but in Crane’s story, the battle is unfair. The men and the sea are like two sides at war, and the sea has a notable advantage. The waves of the sea are “wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall” (213). They’re so savage, huge, and sudden that the confrontation seems unjust or wrong, as the men only have a boat smaller than a “bathtub” for protection.
To expand the theme of people versus nature, Crane uses personification. He instills the sea with human traits, so it’s as if the sea is a person or, more precisely, an overwhelming army squaring off against the four men on the boat. The sea has a conscience since it’s “wrong” for the sea to beset the men with such waves. It also has body parts because it “caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular” (236). Here, the sea is less like a human army and more like a monstrous human with incredible strength and powers. It has no problem catching the boat and swinging it around.
The personification also links to gender since the correspondent thinks of nature as a woman and talks about it using feminine pronouns. The narrator muses, “She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent” (234). Here, nature isn’t an army or a superhuman creature but a woman with feelings and emotions. Better put, the men are up against a woman with a lack of feelings and emotions. She could be smart, mean, or disloyal, but she remains unconcerned about the plight of the men.
The portrayal of nature as indifferent complicates the theme. If nature doesn’t care about the men on the boat, then nature has no palpable reason to battle them. Nature isn’t spiteful or evil, so what the men are up against isn’t an antagonistic force; nature simply exists and therefore doesn’t care about the men one way or the other. However, it is difficult for the men to conceive of nature in these impersonal terms. When the huge wind tower impresses the correspondent, the story clarifies that “[i]t represented to the correspondent the calm of Nature against the struggles of the individual […] and Nature in the vision of men” (234). Even as the correspondent finds a symbol for nature’s indifference to humans, he must remind himself that this is merely “Nature in the sight of men”—that is, an attempt to make meaning of something that does not have meaning in and of itself.
Survival Versus Fate and Powerlessness
The theme of people versus nature ties into the theme of survival versus fate. Humans battle nature to survive, and the conflict suggests that a person might not have much control or agency over their life. On the boat, the men try to do what they can to outlast the sea. They form a community, work together, and unify against their shared foe. The captain tries to get the men to believe that they have a degree of control over the situation when he tells them, “[W]e’ll get ashore all right” (216). Yet “the tone” of the captain’s voice makes the men question how much agency they possess. The men think about how their survival depends upon the wind and sea.
The men’s lack of power makes them castigate fate. As with nature, Crane personifies fate and turns it into a proper noun: A woman named Fate. The men call Fate an “old ninny-woman” and believe “she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes” (222-23). The men think:
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. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work (223).
The men can’t figure out what fate intends to do with them, which makes them upset and hostile. They describe fate with sexist language, yet their portrayal of fate as all-powerful subverts gender dynamics. In this instance, the woman has authority over the men and can control if they live or die.
Mysterious fate might be why the oiler dies but the other three men survive. The oiler seems to have the individual strength to make it. When the boat capsizes, he swims “strongly and rapidly” (236). Yet the oiler’s agency and specific traits aren’t enough. He dies, and the other three men, including the injured captain and the overweight cook, survive. By having the oiler die, Crane suggests that individuality and agency take a backseat in determining human survival.
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By Stephen Crane
