The four men and the sea

You could take Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the start and culmination of a certain kind of American story. Call it psychological realism, or hard-bitten modernism, or something else, but there's a real line of development here. It's not coincidental that Hemingway was a great admirer of Crane's work.

"The Open Boat" is still a terrific read. A "classic" you don't have to force yourself through. The plot is simple. Four men are in a dingy after their boat sank off the coast of Florida (a situation Crane himself had experienced). They are identified only by their occupations: the cook, the oiler, the correspondent and the injured captain. They are trying to row ashore through overwhelming waves that threaten to swamp them, but they get forced further out. A shark circles.

As in The Old Man and the Sea, great hopes are raised only to be crushed by indifferent nature. And as in The Old Man and the Sea, the real story is the minds of the boat's occupants.

It's interesting to note the differences though. Crane in 1898 is naturally less sophisticated in his psychological approach. We are told directly the states of the men's minds—their desperation, their angers, their railing against fate, their fatigue—rather than infer this from their random thoughts, as we do with Hemingway's fisherman five decade's later. The character in "Open Boat" whose point of view we get, the correspondent, is obviously a stand-in for the author. In Old Man, the author does not exist—once on the sea, only the old man does.

In "Open Boat", everything focuses on the matter at hand, the fight against the elements. We know nothing else about the characters apart from their professions by which they are indicated. In Old Man we get the entire man, his most profound thoughts about life as well as his most trivial and practical concerns, everything that passes through his mind. True, it's a novella, while "Open Boat" is a short story and therefore must be more focused. But even so, this illustrates a development in the modern story—a growing use of miscellaneous thoughts and events to create an impressionistic canvas. Hemingway needs the space to let his character and environment breathe, take shape, while Crane has us holding our breath, never straying from the central crisis, until the last line.

Both approaches are valid of course. They are on the same spectrum of the developing short story, American form. Being so immersed in modernist and post-modernist writing these days, it refreshing to occasionally read the more direct style from the early days of this movement.

"The Open Boat" is found in several anthologies, but your best choice may be The Open Boat and Other Stories, which also includes Crane's neglected first short novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and two other great Crane stories, "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky".    

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.