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The proprietor, Scully, is unable to calm the Swede down, unsuccessfully, and the Swede makes an ominous prediction. "I know I won't get out of here alive," he says.
Scully attempts to lay the blame at his son Johnnie's feet, but the Swede will not be swayed. "I will leave this house. I will go away, because I do not wish to be killed. Yes, of course, I am crazy -- yes." The Swede goes upstairs to retrieve his luggage and the men pondered the situation. Johnnie insists, correctly, that the men didn't do anything to provoke the Swede. The Easterner supports the boy, saying, "I didn't see anything at all." Scully follows the Swede upstairs in an attempt to get him to stay, and succeeds. They share a drink and return downstairs. They sit by the stove, ate dinner together and, despite the Swede's increasingly bizarre behavior, end up playing a game of cards. Then the Swede accuses Johnnie of cheating. "Such scenes often prove that there can be little of dramatic import in environment," Crane writes. "Any room can present a tragic front. & #8230;This little den was now hideous as a torture-chamber." Things go downhill from here.
Violence erupts in the room and Johnnie insists...
For him, it is a matter of pride, "I'll fight any man what says I cheat," he throws at the Swede. At first, the other men try to stop the fight, but the Swede will not back down from his accusation and Johnnie won't back down from the need for a physical fight. Finally, the Swede agrees to fight Johnnie. "Yes, fight,' roared the Swede. He was like a demoniac," Crane writes. The other men seem to have given up. The cowboy is in despair and turns to Scully for an answer. "We'll let them fight," was the Irishman's verdict.
The Easterner, as the observer, take sit all in. The men have moved outside into the snow, and Crane notes that the Easterner "took lasting impressions of the three men." Scully was the "iron nerved master of the ceremony." The Swede was "Pale, motionless, terrible." Johnnie, the boy, was "serene yet ferocious, brutish yet heroic." The buildup to the fight, Crane, writes, "had in it a tragedy greater than the tragedy of action."
The fight that ensures between the Swede and Johnnie is violent, and the other three men -- Scully, the cowboy and the Easterner -- act as spectators and, at times, cheerleaders. The cowboy was cheering for
Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat" is a masterful example of Naturalistic storytelling that evokes the characters of four men stranded on a small boat as well as character of the sea itself. By the end of this long short story, despite the fact that Crane has provided us with only the most elliptical clues about these four men, we have came to understand a great deal about their characters.
Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until
The Swede may have been a trouble maker, but he was right about his accusations. He had to grab the gambler at the saloon, because the gambler was already destined to act. They were all part of an 'act' in a play that was already rehearsed and going to be performed like it or not. The other passage in the story that is very telling is: One viewed the existence of
If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intentions. 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.
"The Open Boat" may have been based on Crane's real-life experience but it also functions as symbolic "of man's battle against the malevolent, indifferent, and unpredictable forces of nature…This reading is confirmed by the final irony of the death of the oiler, physically the strongest man on the scene and the one most favored to withstand the ordeal" (Rath & Shaw 97). The futility of resisting the power nature with
London's traveler is, to a certain degree, experiencing less terrible conditions and he is practically responsible for everything that happens to him. In contrast, the men on the boat have no power over what happens to them and they are constantly subjected to unfortunate events, even with the fact that they do everything that they can in order to remedy things. Crane's characters virtually refuse to believe that nature