In spite of the storyteller's bounty of animistic (creature like), humanistic (human), and deistic (divine) portrayals of nature, Crane clarifies that nature is eventually unconcerned with the predicament of man, having no awareness that we can get it. As the stranded men advance through the story, the truth of nature's absence of worry for them turns out to be progressively certain. The storyteller highlights this improvement by changing the way he depicts the ocean. Ahead of schedule in the story, the ocean growls, murmurs, and bucks like a horse; later, it only "paces forward and backward," no longer an on-screen character in the men's dramatization. Truly, the ocean does not change by any means; just the men's impression of the ocean changes.
