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. Crane what must be seen as almost a stereotypical stratagem of the Naturalistic writer (Hill 1989) in placing people in a situation in which their characters are laid bare by the fact that the raw force of Nature is arrayed against them and this paper examines how Crane provides us with clues about how the proximity of danger peels away carefully constructed outer layers of our personalities. Each of these men may die from exposure or drowning or thirst, and because each one knows this, he reveals, intentionally or not, something of his most essential nature. Crane writes about these revelations with skill and wonderfully evocative language, although he saves his most compelling descriptions not for the men but for the sea itself. In the end, we understand something of the nature of each of these men as they find themselves challenged by the might of nature, but we actually discover more about the nature of the sea itself. This paper also examines the ways in which Crane creates a portrait of the sea as a marvelous complex, protean entity, perhaps in...

With his double use of the word "probably" Crane makes us realize early on (in chapter two) that the sea is both more powerful than the men and also something far grander than it, something beyond their ability to understand or even imagine. (Brown discusses these ways in which nature but not humans "plays" in chapter two.)
The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse; shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.

We see throughout the story how those creatures that make their homes in the sea are at one with it, in contrast to the men who are so very much not at home, who do not have the psychological or physical capacity to be at home in this sea, as in this description of the birds who come to watch the men:

Canton flannel gulls flew near and far. Sometimes they sat down on the sea, near patches of brown sea-weed that rolled over the waves with a movement like carpets online in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the…