In Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” we find the sense of nature as an entity all her own, with whims and desires and intentions that have little or nothing to do with humankind. In this story, four men are shipwrecked and attempting to find their way back to land in an old dinghy. The four men in the boat struggle with more than just the waves and the weather, though. As they struggle to survive through rationing of food and water, fighting off the exhaustion of body and mind, and contend with the sharks that come to investigate the boat, they continuously think about nature in terms of a thinking, rational being.
The correspondent, for example, keeps asking, “If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” Eventually, this character does make it to shore by swimming for it along with two of his companions in the boat, but the oiler drowns trying to get to land through the surf. “The entire action of the narrative reveals the correspondent’s contemplation and resigned acceptance of his (humankind’s) insignificance and isolation in the face of an environment that simply does not care” (Adams, 1954). This effectively responds to those individuals who believe ocean levels can’t rise because we would lose too much of New York as if nature would respect our wishes in this.
Works Cited
Adams, Richard P. “Naturalistic Fiction: ‘The Open Boat.” Tulane Studies in English. Reprinted in Stephen Crane’s Career: Perspectives and Evaluations. Thomas A. Gullason (Ed.). New York: New York, 1972.
Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” (1897). Web.