Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat

Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat captures the conflict between man and nature and all the complexities therein entailed. In so doing, Crane’s story blends the real with the fictional in order to create a kind of sublimely founded analysis of the human spirit’s ability to cope with things seemingly beyond the reach of an ordinary human. Crane achieves this by alternating between commonplace human tropes that often contradict each others, such as hope and hopelessness, realism and cynicism and the like.

Even the novel’s structure is indicative of the manner in which Crane seeks to trace the evolution of the human spirit. The novel’s seven sections emerge as seven different avenues of human solidarity for the four survivors, each of whom embody a personal approach to survival and endurance. All four characters in the novel seem to exist for some different purpose, with the journalist emerging as a kind of storyteller, the Captain as a symbol of broken human ingenuity, the Cook as the healthful and care-free archetype and Billie as the embodiment of brute force. Each character thus brings to the table a quality that, by itself, is likely insufficient to save them from a cruel fate.

Interestingly, all four characters appear as optimistic, hopeful that they will be rescued from the sea. However, as time wanes on and this sense of hope begins to dwindle, there is a collective recognition of the unforgiving nature as insensitive; the seas will not assist the companions in their rescue, though there is almost a sense that these four characters expected to receive some assistance from the natural order of things. As they begin to perceive that such assistance will never arrive, the characters begin to become frustrated, but instead of taking out this frustration on its source (i.e. nature), the men begin to turn on each other. This in-fighting only exposes these men further to the dangers of the natural order of things and they begin to become tentative, refusing to approach matters with the attitude necessary to overcome their collective hardship. It is as though the group of four is literally adrift in a sea of inhumanity, failing to comprehend how they may survive an ordeal that leaves them so helpless and at the mercy of the fierceness of nature.

Increasingly, these four characters become distanced from both the human component of reality, in addition to the natural one. When a lighthouse appears, the men fear that they will be unable to reach it and upon glimpsing a waving man from shore, the inability to reach out and contact the party in question emerges as symbolic of the human distance that has developed between them as they search for hope, though they refuse to undertake any deed that may serve to bring hope. In this sense, the characters emerge as symbols of human paralysis in the face of overwhelming odds. Eventually, even the appearance of what might be a man-eating shark is not enough to engender fear in the correspondent, for example, who seems resigned to a cruel fate despite a manifest desire to survive.

Ultimately, however, three of the four men do survive and through the death of Billie, by far the most physically capable of the group, Crane seems to express a kind of anti-Darwinist theology that places the capacity for human ingenuity squarely within the tradition of solidarity and connectivity, as opposed to isolationism and raw fitness. That Billie is unable to survive that which he should be more than capable of surviving—the swim to shore—can be seen as Crane speaking against the primacy of Darwinist survival of the fittest. Billie is more than capable of reaching the shore as he sets out to do so on his own, but the manner in which he passes and his fellows live seems to indicate that Crane positions the latter group for survival due to their capacity for camaraderie with both man and nature.

In other words, Billie’s inability to draw on nature’s reserves in the form of a spare paddle to carry him to shore, for example, seems to reflect Crane’s focus on the primacy of camaraderie, as opposed to brute individuality, as represented in Billie. As such, Billie’s raw strength is insufficient to allow him to survive an ordeal that requires man to consider that nature is not sympathetic to his plight, but rather may provide opportunities to escape this plight. The three men who escape a cruel fate only do so after surrendering to the fates of nature, recognizing that they can only survive at the mercy of the natural order, whereas Billie remains under the mistaken impression that he can overcome this natural order through raw individual force alone.

In Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, the origins of human ingenuity are explored through a juxtaposition of human solidarity and brute natural force. Slowly but surely, the novel’s characters begin to resign themselves to a fate at the hands of nature that is perhaps not to their liking, but which they nevertheless seem to accept, if only because it cannot be overcome. Only once they do this are they provided with an opportunity to escape nature’s grasp, though one of their fellows fails to take advantage of this opportunity. Through Billie, Crane speaks to a kind of anti-Darwinian humanity in which pure fitness is not sufficient to survive the superior force of the natural order of things. As such, Billie, the most physically able of the four fellows is the only one who is unable to survive the ordeal. Indeed, the three characters who do survive the ordeal at sea are together when they find Billie’s body, lifelessly strewn along the shore. It as though Crane is suggesting that through a shared spirit of ingenuity, the three who look upon death were able to cheat it, at least.