Summary Of Stephen Crane's The Open Boat

Picture yourself stranded on a sinking boat in the middle of the ocean. Would you attempt to save yourself and everyone on board or completely give up on the idea of escaping this tragedy? Would you expect help to come for you or step up and try to lead everyone to safety yourself? Luckily, in the short story “The Open Boat” written by Stephen Crane, he answers these questions in his writing that is about four crew members on a boat that have found themselves faced with this exact dilemma. This piece, based on an actual incident in Crane’s life, was written not to explain what to do during a ship crisis, but to demonstrate the impossible ability to control the future. In other words, no matter what the crew members tried to do, they could not change the fact that they were stranded at sea surrounded by all types of dangers. With this in mind, one possible theme for this short story is that we are simply one of the many elements of nature and that the world around us is not predetermined but naturally dominated by mere chance.
In “The Open …show more content…
The warm welcome from everyone on shore contrasted greatly with the silence brought with the corpse that was carried onto the beach from the ocean waves. After their whole experience of surviving this, the lasting crew members perceived the waves and sounds of the ocean as something they could now fully understand.
Throughout “The Open Boat,” Crane uses an unique use of a shifting point of view. His story was written from the perspective of every crew member. The passages of dialogue, which the speakers are not ever identified, allows the reader to infer that every crew member shares a similar opinion over what is happening to them in their situation. The correspondent is the only character whose thoughts are identified. This is said to be because of the author’s ability to understand and relate to this character the most (“The Open