One critic's reading of "The Open Boat" positions the story as a turning point in Crane's career, away from the isolation and interiority of The Red badge of Courage and towards a sense of the need of community and the inescapability of interpersonal bonding. Statements like "Four scowling men sat in the dingey" are taken by some to be indicators of the camaraderie that must necessarily form between any human beings caught together in such a situation (Crane 732; Shulman).
Still others take a far more personal approach to interpreting this story. Not only did Crane live through events almost exactly like those depicted in the story, but many of his stories are based on personal experiences. It is thus the psychological understanding that Crane brings to his stories that impart the majority of their meaning and value, according to some scholars (Starrett 407-8). Having been a war correspondent in the Spanish-American war and a traveling writer for various other reasons, Crane was exposed to a wide variety of experiences and ways of life, and this undoubtedly gave him a deep understanding of human nature. This element is what is hailed above all others by some critics as Crane's greatest achivement throughout his body of works. Others remind us, however, that while Stephen Crane was an excellent psychologist, he was also a true poet" (Shulman 405).
It is this combination of talents, or rather the supreme combination of all of his talents, that makes Crane's work as a whole and "The Open Boat" in particular so compelling and enduring. None of the critical interpretations described above are precisely incorrect, except that they attempt to assert one or another of the story's elements is the central or primary perspective from which the story is told and is best understood. In reality, all of these interpretations should carry equal weight in the reader's mind, as they do in the text itself. The truest of the interpretations above is that which emphasizes the autobiographical nature of the story, but only in that the story is an accurate rendering of human experience -- not necessarily specific events or even specific humans, but accurate nonetheless. Memories such as this are incredibly powerful...
The
literary impressionism Crane achieves here is another facet of the simple human reality of the piece, as are feelings of community and of isolation, and as are the psychological mechanisms at work in the mind, whether they are consciously understood and rendered or not.
Stephen Crane's major innovation in "The Open Boat" was the more accurate and skilful rendering of humanity. This is what all
literature strives for. Joseph Conrad was so impressed by this story that close emulations of it can be seen in his own work, both in
structure and even in some similar passages (Owen). He, too, was a master of
description and of psychological understanding; literature endures precisely because it is multi-faceted and ultimately irreducible.
Works Cited
Bender, Bert. "Hanging Stephen Crane in the Impressionist Museum." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 47-55. Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430844
Crane, Stephen. "The Open Boat." Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Accessed 6 December 2009. http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CraOpen.html
Owen, Guy Jr. "Crane's 'The Open Boat' and Conrad's 'Youth'." Modern Language Notes, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Feb., 1958), pp. 100-102. Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3043047
Shulman, Robert. "Community,
Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to 'The Open Boat'."
American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Nov., 1978), pp. 441-460. Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2925137
Starrett, Vincent. "Stephen Crane: An Estimate." The Sewanee Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1920), pp. 405-413. Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27533327
Weatherford, Richard. Stephen Crane. New York: Routledge, 1997.
