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Special Section: Blue Short Stories

The Sea Around Them: A Blue Reading of Ecological Coexistence in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”

Inger-Anne Søfting
p. 47-63

Résumés

La nouvelle “The Open Boat” de Stephen Crane constitue une contribution importante à la littérature maritime et en porte de nombreux traits caractéristiques. Dans cette histoire, quatre hommes, les survivants d’un naufrage, luttent à bord d’un petit canot contre la force des vagues. Sans secours à l’horizon, ils ne peuvent compter que sur leur volonté, leur discipline et leurs compétences. L’océan occupe une place centrale dans cette nouvelle, et la rencontre des hommes avec les vagues implacables influence leur perception d’eux-mêmes et de leur place dans l’univers. L’histoire de Crane est souvent interprétée comme une bataille existentielle entre l’homme et la nature, une confrontation avec des éléments hostiles qui engendre un sentiment d’aliénation, de solitude et d’exclusion du monde. En s’appuyant sur l’écocritique et les théories du nouveau matérialisme, cet article ne traite pas tant de l’aliénation et de la séparation que des différentes formes d’enchevêtrement présentées dans l’histoire et de l’expérience qu’en font les quatre hommes. L’objectif est de montrer que cette histoire parle davantage d’un enracinement écologique que d’une séparation.

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And as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
Denise Levertov, “To the Reader”

1Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” is an important contribution to the world of maritime fiction and bears many of this literature’s hallmarks. Maritime fiction has been studied by Margaret Cohen who, in The Novel and the Sea, contends that “the heroes of sea fiction perform their capacity to negotiate the edges of an unknown, expanding, chaotic, violent, and occasionally beautiful sublunary realm relying on human agency alone” (3). In his book Blue Ecocriticism, Sidney Dobrin explains that in English-language literature, representations of ocean have served two main roles. One is as setting, and in such narratives the themes are typically dominated by conflicts between characters. The other is as “a force against which protagonists often struggle. Ocean, in these narratives, is cast as antagonist. A significant amount of twentieth-century oceanic literature displays this theme, depicting ocean as wild nature and as a force against which individuals must persevere” (16). He further notes that this typically is a masculine territory. Crane’s story largely substantiates readings such as these, but at times also challenges them. For instance, there is no doubt that the sea is cast as a force the characters struggle against, but the story also problematizes an antagonistic relationship between humans and the sea by underlining the importance of respecting the elements.

  • 1 Crane’s first textual rendering of the dramatic event was “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” first publis (...)

2“The Open Boat” takes as its point of departure an event experienced by Crane himself. The event is mentioned in the subtitle, “A Tale Intended to be after the Fact. Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore.” In January of 1897, Crane sought to go to Cuba as a correspondent on the Commodore, which, despite the American neutrality position, was heading for Cuba with arms for the Cuban insurgents. Just off the coast of Florida, it lost power and eventually sank. Crane was among the last of the crew members to leave the sinking ship; together with the captain Edward Murphy, the oiler William Higgins, and the steward Charles B. Montgomery, he narrowly escaped from the shipwreck in a ten-foot dinghy. In the story, the only character given a name is the oiler, Billie, and the only reference to the shipwreck is found in the description of the captain, who “had on him the stern impression of a scene in the grays of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down” (“Open Boat” 123-24). Instead of dwelling on the dramatic events of the shipwreck, the story focuses in close-up on the four survivors as they struggle for their life in a ten-foot dinghy.1 Throughout the story, the shore is in sight, giving them hope of rescue.

3Many of Western literature’s greatest sea narratives involve voyages in large ocean-going vessels that provide ample space for developing human communities and for long-drawn exposure to a variety of natural conditions. Søren Frank writes that “[t]he calm rhythms of nature, the rhythm of the sailor and the ship in relation to nature, and the sociocultural rhythm on board the ship—that is, the necessity of a mutual rhythm to navigate in relation to the rhythms of the planet—are therefore evidently of vital significance for ship life” (187). Such rhythms are essential also in Crane’s story, but here in a compact, condensed version that suits the short story genre eminently. Because their vessel is so small and because, as the title significantly states, it is open, the four men are almost entirely exposed to the elements and have no retreat from the wind and the waves. They are just barely held afloat and out of water by the small dinghy and the story depicts with convincing detail the men’s tireless struggle to prevent the dinghy from being swallowed by the waves. Their attention to their surroundings and to each other’s movements is therefore constantly acute and vigilant, as even the smallest inattention could cause their demise in the waves. In other words, they are entirely focused on their physical and material interaction with the sea and the wind, with the little boat, and with each other. They need to be able to assess the force of the wind and the height of the waves and the impact these factors have on their vessel, while simultaneously paying attention to their own movements. Their life depends on their ability to observe, understand, and respond adequately to these connections and rhythms.

4“The Open Boat” is a story about relations and coexistence. Its ceaseless focus on the relationship between man, boat, and nature and its concern with material and psychological interactions between various forms of agencies beg eco-critical approaches. All ecological thinking is relational and in one way or other focuses on how things are inescapably entangled, enmeshed, or interconnected, to use terms that have become common parlance in the field of the environmental humanities and the ecocritical study of literature. Such terms underline the necessary and unavoidable ecological connections between all forms of life and seek to deconstruct the traditionally hegemonic position of humanity. New materialist thought in particular eschews hierarchical, vertical thinking and instates in its place a flat ontology that underlines the reciprocal interdependency of all matter. Stacy Alaimo uses the term “trans-corporeality,” which she describes as “a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (“States of Suspension” 478). New materialism does not reserve agency for humans, or even living beings, but distributes it to all matter, and thus approaches a conflation of traditional subject-object dualism. Alaimo contends that “[g]rappling with what it means to understand materiality as agential, rather than as passive, inert, and malleable, is at the heart of new materialist theory” (Exposed 130).

5Human experience of this ecological entanglement, or transcorporeality, does not necessarily spur assertiveness or confirmation. As Timothy Morton contends, “[e]nvironmental rhetoric is too often strongly affirmative, extraverted, and masculine. . . . It’s sunny, straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and ‘healthy’” (Ecological Thought 16). Rather, in representing an awareness of the mesh, to use Morton’s concept, environmental rhetoric should give more room for the experience of something disorienting, unfamiliar, and even threatening—of what Morton calls strange strangers: “There is indeed an environment, yet when we examine it, we find it is made of strange strangers. Our awareness of them isn’t always euphoric or charming or benevolent” (Ecological Thought 58). Awareness of “strange strangers,” something we do not know and understand but still need to acknowledge our affinity with, is a form of ecological encounter that challenges our sense of self and the boundaries we have erected between ourselves and the non-human world. To think ecologically means to dismantle boundaries and accept connectedness, even when this is uncomfortable: “The ecological thought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror. Democracy is well served by irony, because irony means there are other points of view that we must acknowledge” (Ecological Thought 17). Ecological encounters can be hearty as well as uncanny.

6Crane’s story is often read as depicting an existential battle between men and nature, an encounter with hostile elements that causes a feeling of alienation, loneliness, and of being cast out from the world. Relying on ecocriticism and new materialist thought, the following pages will discuss not so much alienation and separation as the different forms of entanglement presented in the story and the four men’s experience of this entanglement. The aim is to show that the story is one of ecological embeddedness rather than separateness. The primary focus will be the men in the boat and their coexistence with the natural elements, most crucially with the sea and its creatures, the sharks and the seagulls, but attention will also be given to the entanglement in the boat, between the men and between them and the boat. An attending concern will be the story’s running meta-discussion of the representation and conceptualization of the non-human world and its highlighting of anthropomorphism and picturesque perspectives as well as the simultaneous search for alternatives to these. It is a text that while telling its story is also searching for the adequate form.

Oceanic Entanglement

  • 2 Crane’s impressionism is noted by several commentators, for instance by Crane’s biographer Paul Sor (...)

7Unlike other marine texts, Crane’s story does not start on land; it starts at sea. The sea is a powerful presence in “The Open Boat.” It is the catalyst that sets everything in motion, and it is at the heart of the four men’s experience with the natural environment; it is foreground, not background. Because the representation of it reflects the experience of men in a boat so small it just barely keeps them afloat, the sea is seen and felt in close-up and the men respond physically, sensorially, and emotionally to it: “In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in a dinghy ” (“Open Boat” 124). Had they been on board a larger vessel, the materiality of the sea would not have been as acutely felt. From down between the waves and from the wave tops, the attention of the men is entirely focused on the sea: “None of them knew the color of the sky” but “all of the men knew the colors of the sea” (123). The only way they can tell the time of day is by looking at the colors of the sea: “The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon the color of the waves that rolled toward them” (125). The sea around them is not described as a massive, uniform body of water but is depicted as ever-changing and colorful. Sometimes the waves “were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white” (123), while in broad daylight “the color of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow” (124-25). Such descriptions could be ascribed to what is often identified as Crane’s impressionist aesthetic,2 but they could also be seen as descriptions of ecological connections. The sea itself has no stable color but changes depending on wind and on the light from above as well as the life and conditions below. As pioneer marine ecologist Rachel Carson writes about the surface of the sea, “[t]he face of the sea is always changing. Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour” (Sea Around Us 29). The sea as experienced by the men is vital, colorful, and perpetually in motion. It never gives them rest and forces them to live in a constantly changing moment, literally in a flow.

8Representation and interpretation of ecological experiences and entanglements are important concerns in the text; how to represent the non-human world and human experience is constantly returned to. The sea is vast, the waves are tall, the dinghy small, and the men even smaller. The men’s perspective is from between the waves, and they are literally enmeshed in the sea that has sloshed into their boat and soaked them. The text’s third-person narrator ponders what this scene must have looked like from a distance: “Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque” (124). We know that these are not the thoughts and musings of the men because “they had no time to see it” (124). The multivalent wording is quite characteristic for the text’s refusal to spell things out, thus leaving epistemological gaps. The word “balcony” suggests that it is a perspective from above, a bird’s-eye-view providing an overview of the scene from a perspective at a distance to and disentangled from the sea, but equally important, “balcony” evokes theatres and someone watching a performance, something staged. This is also supported by the word “picturesque.” A picturesque scene is the world as framed by the human eye: “In the picturesque, the world is designed to look like a picture—like it’s already been interpreted and packaged by a human” (Morton, Being Ecological 24). The narrator appears to question whether this would have been the correct representation of this scene. The following passage is difficult not to read as fine irony: “It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber” (125). The perspective of the men in the boat is not picturesque; for them the sea feels neither glorious nor splendid, for they are in the middle of it, tied to its rhythm, and they do not have the opportunity to ponder its aesthetic value at a distance. Morton writes that the view “from close up, that’s a whole different matter. . . . The picture quality evaporates. . . . It starts to become quite strange: you see all kinds of crystals, all kinds of curves and shapes that don’t have much relevance to your regular world. . . . You start to realize that this isn’t just your very own world” (Being Ecological 25). The men’s perspective of the world from the sea makes the world unfamiliar since it deprives them of the familiarity afforded by the anthropocentric, picturesque mode.

  • 3 The line is repeated on pages 135-36.

9An extension of agency, or agentic capacity, to all forms of matter is a central tenet in new materialist thought. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann write that agency “is not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and with human intentionality, but it is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of generative dynamism” (3). The agency of the sea, what it does and why, is a central problem in “The Open Boat” and it surfaces in the four men’s response to the sea’s actions. The waves move in “Sisyphusian” succession, one after the other, giving the men in the boat no pause or sense of accomplishment as each time one wave has been tackled a new wave is waiting. They are tied to the rhythm of the sea, as well as the boat’s movement in the sea, and if they want to survive, they need to respect this connectedness. They need to fight with the sea rather than against it. Their proximity to the waves, their enmeshed or entangled condition, thrusts in their face the fact that the sea is doing something, that it causes things to happen and so has a form of agency, but they fail to understand its nature, as the only way of thinking about agency known to them is to think of it in human terms. Greg Garrard claims that “the tendency to perceive mind-like intentionality beyond our own species is a psychological universal” (155). The men respond with anger and frustration to what they perceive as the relentless onslaught of the waves. The waves are anthropomorphically described as “most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall” (123) and as “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (124). The men wrongly perceive nature as hostile to them because they have no other way of understanding it and because it gives them just reason to rage: “For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard” (139). They expect there to be a purpose behind events and to be rewarded for their hard work but discover that this form of ethics cannot be applied in their current situation. For a long time, they still cling to it, as indicated by the following line, which is repeated in the story, almost like a mantra: “‘If I’m going to the drowned—if I’m going to be drowned—if I’m 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?’” (131).3

10Anthony Channel Hilfer perceptively says that “[i]f the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story’s central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than a human perspective” (248). This is one of the most central problems of any human attempt at avoiding an anthropocentric perspective. As soon as we try to represent the non-human, we slip into anthropomorphism. The alternative would seem to be not representing something, leaving an opening where it should have been, or presenting it as strange and unfamiliar. Anthropomorphism may not facilitate an actual understanding of the non-human world, but it creates an illusion of comprehensible sameness, thus providing a feeling of firm epistemological ground under one’s feet. As Albert Camus puts it, “[t]he mind’s deepest desire . . . is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. . . . The truism ‘All thought is anthropomorphic’ has no other meaning” (506). The unfamiliar can generate fear; anthropomorphism makes the unknown familiar and potentially manageable.

11The rather glaring examples of anthropomorphism in “The Open Boat” serve to illustrate the desperation and epistemological shortcomings of the four brave men in the boat. The narrative voice in the text is consistently that of a third-person narrator, but the focalization frequently lies close to the men, especially the correspondent. However, there is at times a clearly felt distance between narrative voice and the opinions of the men that creates an element of irony. We understand that their anthropomorphization is misguided and that the text does not support their views. In fact, despite their hard work and valor, they at times seem almost ridiculous. John Berryman quotes Edward Garnett who defined two qualities that he saw as characteristic of Crane’s writing: “his wonderful insight into and mastery of the primary passions, and his irony deriding the swelling emotions of the self” (266). In continuation of this, Berryman contends that Crane “is simultaneously at war with the people he creates and on their side—and displays each of these attitudes so forcibly that the reader feels he is himself being made a fool of” (278). In “The Open Boat,” the men’s primary passions cause them to rage against injustice but the swelling of their emotions as they rage against the preposterous waves and what they call “the ninny woman fate” makes them appear pathetic. Anthropomorphism, along with the picturesque, are presented as understandable yet inadequate responses to the non-human world, here represented chiefly by the sea.

12As an ecological text, Crane’s story is quite radical because it refrains entirely from romanticizing the meeting between humans and nature. The text, unlike the men, does not anthropomorphize but presents the non-human as other. The characters’ encounter with the sea and the waves is presented as alienating because they do not understand that which they are inescapably entangled with, that which will not let go of them. Timothy Morton observes that “[e]nvironmental awareness might have something intrinsically uncanny about it, as if we were seeing something we shouldn’t be seeing, as if we realized we were caught in something” (Ecological Thought 58). The sea’s vastness—its unfathomable depths and endless extension—along with the fact that it is an impossible habitat for humans, makes it particularly suitable for representing human beings’ feeling of attachment to something they experience as alien but nevertheless depend on. Alaimo notes that “the pervasive trope of the oceans as alien may alienate humans from the seas, but it may also suggest that sea life hovers at the very limits of what terrestrial humans can comprehend” (“States of Suspension” 477). Human beings cannot dwell at sea and in any story set at sea the basic plot line is given; the characters need to reach shore at the end; it is either that or die.

13In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton comments that “we are indeed physically derived from marine animals and in large part constituted by salt water” (197). Notwithstanding such material origin stories, the men in Crane’s story have no feeling of kinship with the animals of the sea. In fact, the uncanniness of the men’s ecological encounters is particularly prominent in their meeting with sharks and seagulls. In the episode depicting their sighting of the shark, the correspondent is the most central of the four men, and he is also the only one of the men in the boat who is not an experienced sailor and not accustomed to life at sea. The shark is defamiliarized, underlining the strangeness of its appearance to the correspondent, who on his vigil is the first to see it. What is described is the sound of it, its color, and the sense of movement: “There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters” (138). The swift, elegant movement of the shark in the water is a stark contrast to the men huddled together in the little boat and it emphasizes that although the men and the shark share the sea this night, the men do not belong there: “The correspondent saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving the long glowing trail. . . . The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired” (138). The shark is referred to as “the thing,” as an object the spectator does not understand and naturally fears but also admires. The correspondent’s observation of the shark circling around the boat is a form of ecological encounter, an encounter with what Morton calls a strange stranger. In fact, all ecological encounters have an element of uncertainty and the uncanny about them because no thing is entirely accessible to an other thing. Morton notes that “[o]ntology should respect the strangeness and uncanniness of things, acknowledging that objects are unique entities, and thus ontologically separate, no matter how much they may interact or be entangled with one another” (“Treating Objects” 65). A shark, an animal dangerous to humans and at home in a habitat humans cannot inhabit, is a very clear example of a creature, a thing, inaccessible to humans.

14The shark is not anthropomorphized but is presented as an other in the text, something strange. In fact, the word “shark” is not mentioned until a dialogue between the correspondent and the captain subsequent to their experiences during the night. The correspondent’s response to it is not explained and thus also remains strange. When the correspondent looks at the shark, the text says that “this biding thing did not affect the man with the same horror that it would if he had been a picnicker. He simply looked at the sea dully and swore in an undertone” (138). We do not know what this undertone is, whether it is anger, fear, or admiration or a combination of all of these, but his location at sea, near the shark, makes his reaction to it different than if he had found himself leisurely placed on shore, watching from a safe distance with firm ground under his feet. Probably it means that for the correspondent at sea, the shark is more real, more shark, and less symbolic and notorious than it would have been if he had been a picnicker observing it from a distance. From a distance and out of harm’s way, the scene could have looked picturesque. It also means that in the small dinghy the situation is extremely precarious and there is little else the person observing the shark can do but swear ; he cannot shout and wave his arms or do anything that would upset the balance of the boat or the men as he could have if he had been on land. The dinghy literally leaves no room for theatrics.

15The men’s experience with the seagulls, depicted in an episode which precedes their sighting of the shark, also, and even more explicitly, accentuates the fact that the men are entangled with their environment but also that the sea is not the men’s natural habitat. The seagulls can ride the air and sit down on the sea comfortably and without exertion while the men in the boat work incessantly and strenuously to stay afloat, and they envy the seagulls since “the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland” (126). Seagulls are more mundane and less mythically notorious than albatrosses but, regardless, the seagulls in Crane’s text inevitably evoke the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge’s ancient mariner randomly kills the albatross, and for this he and his crew are punished. The men in the boat do not attempt to kill the seagulls, their condition does not allow it; all they can do is swear at them. When one of them attempts to land on the captain’s head, he would like to violently lash out after it “but he did not dare do it, because anything resembling an emphatic gesture would have capsized this freighted boat, and so with his open hand, the captain gently and carefully waved the gull away” (126). The men not only envy the birds, and passively are forced to endure them, they are also frightened by them: “Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny” (126). The bird that attempts to land on the captain’s head they perceive as “somehow grewsome [sic] and ominous” (126). The men’s experience with the birds, like the sharks, represents ecological meetings with otherness, with strange strangers, and their situation in the little boat teaches them that although they feel no similarity with the birds, they coexist with them. Morton, discussing the albatross in Coleridge’s poem, says that “[t]he moral is about the traumatic encounter between strange strangers. . . . It’s the holy otherness of the albatross, not the fact that it is a cute creature, great or small, which disturbs. The sailors can’t fit it into their horizon of meaning, can’t figure out whether to blame it for the ‘fog and mist’” (Ecological Thought 46). In Morton’s reading of Coleridge’s poem, the old Mariner’s saying that “he prayeth well, who loveth best / All things both great and small” (“Ancient Mariner” 164) means the mariner has learned that “true sympathy comes from social feeling—the awareness of coexistence” (Ecological Thought 47). The men’s experience with the sea gulls teaches them about coexistence, but sympathy hardly enters the picture. What the men eventually think about these episodes afterwards, when they become interpreters, is yet a secret kept from us.

Of Men and Boats

16Another form of entanglement in Crane’s story is the relationship between the men in the boat and their coexistence with the boat. From the point of view of a flat materialist ontology, interhuman relationships must also be seen as examples of ecological coexistence: “No man is an island. Humans need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each other’s environment” (Morton, Ecological Thought 4). In oceanic stories involving ships with large crews, conflicts often break out between the men on board, affecting what Frank calls the internal rhythms. These are “social and have to do with the relationships between officers, crew, work, and ship” (192). In Crane’s story, there is a lot of focus on such internal rhythms and there is a complete absence of arrhythmia. All four men fill the function they are capable of in the dinghy—the oiler and the correspondent row, the cook bails the boat, and the captain offers guidance and support—and no one complains or blames the others for not contributing enough. Especially, the cooperation between the correspondent and the oiler, who take turns rowing, is exemplary. The request “Will you spell me?” is never turned down or outwardly met with the reluctance each no doubt feels. Although they have adapted well—“[t]heir backbones had become thoroughly used to balancing in the boat” (130)—their physical and literally material coexistence in the tiny boat is precarious, and they can move and shift places only with the utmost difficulty and deliberation. Still, they never rage against the boat for being so small and unstable like they rage against the waves for being so large. Rather, they seem to think of it tenderly: “She seemed just a wee thing wallowing, miraculously top up, at the mercy of five oceans” (127). Frank observes that “[w]hether we speak of internal or external rhythms, there is usually a hierarchy, a determining rhythm or an original and coordinating aspect, which, like a conductor, regulates the whole ensemble of rhythms” (192). In “The Open Boat,” the men are not helpless; in fact they are quite able, even heroic in an unostentatious manner, but their actions and movements are nevertheless totally determined by rhythms external to the boat. In their little boat they have no choice but to follow the orchestral lead of the sea.

  • 4 It is a passage similar to the epiphanic moment Henry Fleming experiences amidst the din of battle (...)

17The often-discussed episode occurring moments before the men let the dinghy be taken by the surf is important for any reading of the story. The correspondent arrives at the following insight as he contemplates the wind-tower: “It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent” (142). Nature is still anthropomorphized as “she” and the word “indifferent” suggests an anthropocentric logic, but nevertheless, the passage can be interpreted as meaning that the correspondent comes close to understanding the shortcomings of anthropomorphism. The agency of the non-human world is different than human agency.4 Hilfer sensibly claims that in this story “Crane has put the last nail in the coffin of Emerson’s transcendentally idealist concept of nature” (252), although it could perhaps be argued that the men’s concept of nature seems closer to the Puritan wilderness than the Emersonian clearing. Of the two versions of nature—nature in the wind and nature in the vision of men—only the first exists materially, the other is an anthropocentric invention, a fantasy. What is left is what Morton calls ecology without Nature, that is, without the image of nature that humans have created, especially in aesthetic representations, which ultimately has little to do with nature itself. Morton explains that “[t]he sentimental aesthetics of cute animals is obviously an obstacle to the ecological thought. But so is the sublime aesthetics of the awesome” (Ecological Thought 15). There does seem, though, to be an element of something unspoken in Crane’s story that works against seeing it as a purely naturalistic text. It seems that although everything in this text is shown to be tightly connected and interdependent there is still something almost mysterious at work. This mysterious something could be seen as the uncanny that Morton assigns as a quality to all things, since all objects at a point withdraw from each other and cannot be entirely reached. Although there is entanglement, there is also difference: “If ecology without nature has taught us anything, it is that there is a need to acknowledge irreducible otherness, whether in poetics, ethics, or politics” (Ecology Without 151).

18This irreducible otherness begs the question of what it means for human beings’ place in a world where “nature in the wind” does not care about human beings. Paul Auster suggests it means that nature has “in the end, no meaning . . . and mankind is left to cope for itself, to find meanings for itself in the subtle, unarticulated human bond, as in the case of four men stranded together in a boat that cannot reach the shore” (472). Although the brotherhood found in the boat is a fine thing, it does seem like a dead end for mankind to withdraw into itself in opposition to the non-human world. The conclusion is perhaps better turned on its head: the implication of the correspondent’s musings is that humans are not alone or on their own; rather, they are an integral part of “nature in the wind.” The tough lesson is that they are not special, but rather one of the many materials in the mesh and the feeling of alienation is enhanced by the fact that the ocean, although essential to us, is not a human habitat. Søren Frank writes that “[t]he ocean and seafaring are reminders of humanity’s profound entanglements with nature and the nonhuman, of the illusion of any deep, essential split between humans and their environment. If the ocean alienizes our globe, it is in the sense of making it unfamiliar to us, not separate from us. The sea is at the same time the condition (entanglement) and boundary (unfamiliarity) of our human existence” (39).

  • 5 According to Sorrentino, the likely cause of the oiler William Higgins’s death was that he was hit (...)

19Like in so many other oceanic texts, the story ends when the men reach land—three of them alive and one of them dead. One of the confounding mysteries of the text is the death of the oiler, Billie. Three of the men survive, including the hurt captain and the cook, none of whom can swim, while Billie, who is an able swimmer and who has probably worked harder and rowed more than anyone, dies. We are told that he worked an extra shift the night before the shipwreck, which further underlines his unselfish character. After the dinghy hits the surf and is turned over, Billie is observed swimming strongly towards the shore, “ahead in the race” (144). When he is next seen, he is floating face-down in the water, and we realize that in the story he has been given a name in memoriam. Hilfer comments that “Billie’s death is an irony doubly directed at both Christian and Darwinian providence, given that he seems not only the most altruistic of the men in the boat . . . but also the fittest” (253). The one most likely to survive is the only one to die. One explanation could be that Billie overreached and confident that he was a good swimmer, threw caution to the wind. However, there is nothing to suggest that Billie was a hubristic character, quite the contrary. He is not only the ablest of the men, he is also the most disciplined and humble. Again, Crane has the script made for him since this is the way it happened in real life, at least almost. In the actual incident, the oiler William was hit by the boat.5 The sentence “An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man” (145) could have been a foreshadowing, had it not been for the fact that in the story Billie is not hit by the boat, none of them are. The effect is an accentuation of the arbitrary workings of nature. Billie does not die because he has not worked hard or because he does not deserve as much as the rest to live or because he is weak; he dies despite his efforts and skills. Sorrentino writes that “his death confirmed the tragic limitations of humanity’s attempt to control its own destiny” (228). The story does not really present it as anything as grandiose as a tragedy, but it is certainly yet another adjustment of the view of humans as somehow above and in control of the world around them. It is further a chilling moment when the dead oiler, who in life went by a name and whose character has been revealed through his struggles, after his death is reduced to “a shape,” an impersonal “it”: “a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave” (146). The oiler’s unsentimental death and the linguistic reduction of him to an impersonal presence, a mere body, is quite a contrast to what appears to be the correspondent’s thoughts a few moments earlier: “Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature?” (144), which means that human beings tend to assign a lot of importance themselves. The oiler’s death becomes the text’s most notable encounter with humanity’s limits and the limits for what human beings can comprehend. It is a reminder of the transience of life, but thereby also a reminder of our place in the larger scheme of nature.

20The men’s perspective changes already as they approach the shore. Although the shore has been in view all the time, their perspective has been one from the sea, and the shore has been observed from a distance so big that they have not been able to interpret what has happened there. The perspective towards the end is close to the correspondent, and we see that his mind has become accustomed to the constant changing of the sea as he notices and comments on the shore’s stillness: “There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea” (144). His mind has become a bit like the sea. To him the shore looks like a cultural artifact or spectacle: “The shore was set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and understood with his eyes every detail of it” (144). Although he understands it, he looks at it with cognitive distance, as framed by the picturesque: “The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff, topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who, in a gallery, looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland” (144). The picturesque, normally a familiarizing format, here creates conceptual distance and the shore looks manmade rather than real—like a painting.

21The story’s enigmatic last lines indeed read like a picture: “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters” (146). It is a serene scene that invites contemplation—very different from the roaring waves they have just been battling that demanded incessant attention. This descriptive but interpretively introvert ending raises the questions of what they feel they can interpret and why do they now feel like they can be interpreters. It could be their experience of being practically one with the sea and the waves that makes them feel capacitated because they have learned something they did not know before. Alternatively, it could be their return to safe ground that gives them confidence; they now once more view the sea from a distance, like spectators, no longer attached to its rhythm or to the rhythm of the little boat. They are survivors back on terra firma, in the folds of civilization, and again can return to a picturesque presentation of the sea and nature; “nature in the vision of men.” The men’s feeling of ableness and contemplation evokes Rachel Carson’s words in Under the Sea-Wind: “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh . . . is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be” (1). Carson’s words suggest a sublime rather than a picturesque feeling and the sublime is suggested by the sound of the waves in the last passage of Crane’s story, “the great sea’s voice,” which appears to represent the vastness of nature.

22If the men are seized by the picturesque and the sublime after reaching land, it would mean that they have relapsed into anthropocentrism, forgetting the lesson they learnt at sea; that they cannot be interpreters of the universe. The fact that they felt they could be interpreters, suggests that that they could be wrong; that they cannot be interpreters. The ending of the story could be seen as referring back to the story’s subtitle, which states that the story is intended to be after the fact. Already the story’s title opens the door for the possibility that the story may not be accurately “after the fact.” The story’s open ending, like so many other passages in the story, does not explain things to us but rather leaves us puzzled. The many epistemological gaps and the story’s fine irony, providing the text with an element of metatextuality, not only point to shortcomings in human being’s ability to understand the world, but also suggest that human language is sometimes inadequate when it comes to representing the non-human world. The men struggle with uncertainty as nature threatens to prove their old truths wrong. The aforementioned line, “If I’m going to the drowned—if I’m going to be drowned—if I’m 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?” (131, and 135-36), is insistently repeated because the truth it has held to the men is slipping away. It could very well be that they will die, despite having made it this far and worked so hard, this is evidenced by the death of the oiler Billie. The story’s non-authoritarian and questioning style is perhaps the best approach to an ecological style of writing because it does not impose on the non-human world by trespassing or appropriation, but rather creates spaces in the text for that otherness that we cannot fully fathom or represent.

23If we align the story with the real-life incident that inspired it, the men who are constantly gazing at the waves in Crane’s story were meant to just briefly traverse the sea to get to Cuba with weapons. Their journey was meant to be an entirely instrumental crossing of water, bringing them from one shore to the next. It could have been a story about war and contraband solidly anchored in human culture. Instead, the men’s failure to reach Cuba resulted in one of American literature’s greatest marine texts that through its oceanic focus tries to grapple with essential questions about human beings’ relationship to nature and their place in the universe as well as with the problem of how to represent these matters. “The Open Boat,” like so many of Crane’s stories, presents humans in a critical situation that is literally a matter of life or death, but a situation that also perplexes its characters and upsets their sense of self. The bottom line in this story is not that the men are alone and isolated from the world but that they are inescapably entangled with it. Neither does the story reveal the men to be helpless and their actions hopeless; on the contrary, their struggles at sea are admirable, but their efforts are nevertheless conditioned by the sea around them. The story is not a reminder of our being cast out from the world; instead, it is a reminder of our being but a part of it, not above it.

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Bibliographie

Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016. Print.

Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (2012): 476-93. Print.

Auster, Paul. Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021. Print.

Berryman, John. Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography. 1950. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962. Print.

Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012. Print.

Camus, Albert. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” 1942. Albert Camus. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. Introd. David Bellos. New York: Everyman/Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Print.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. 1950. New York: Oxford UP, 2018. Print.

Carson, Rachel. Under the Sea-Wind. 1941. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2021. Print.

Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” 1798. The Oxford Book of the Sea. Ed. Jonathan Raban. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 145-65. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” 1897. The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories. Eds. Anthony Mellors and Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 123-46. Print.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. 1895. The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories. Eds. Anthony Mellors and Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3-17. Print.

Crane, Stephen. “Stephen Crane’s Own Story.” 1897. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. New York: The Library of America, 1984. 875-84. Print.

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Hilfer, Anthony Channel. “Nature as Protagonist in ‘The Open Boat.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54.2 (Summer 2012): 248-57. Print.

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Morton, Timothy. “Treating Objects Like Women. Feminist Ontology and the Question of Essence.” International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism. Eds. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann. New York: Routledge, 2013. 56-69. Print.

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Sorrentino, Paul. Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2014. Print.

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Notes

1 Crane’s first textual rendering of the dramatic event was “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” first published in The New York Press less than a week after the sinking of the Commodore. This reportage complements his later short story, “The Open Boat,” since the account describes in detail what happened prior to and during the shipwreck, but refrains from entering into an elaborate presentation of the four survivors in the dinghy: “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be very instructive for the young, but none is to be told here now” (883).

2 Crane’s impressionism is noted by several commentators, for instance by Crane’s biographer Paul Sorrentino, who writes: “Like impressionist painters, Crane recreated the sensory impression that color and light have on the eye. The focus was on the individual’s fleeting, subjective impression of reality rather than on an attempt to recreate reality objectively” (171). This is particularly notable in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

3 The line is repeated on pages 135-36.

4 It is a passage similar to the epiphanic moment Henry Fleming experiences amidst the din of battle in The Red Badge of Courage: “As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun-gleamings on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment” (34).

5 According to Sorrentino, the likely cause of the oiler William Higgins’s death was that he was hit in the head by the boat as it overturned in the surf (224).

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Inger-Anne Søfting, « The Sea Around Them: A Blue Reading of Ecological Coexistence in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 47-63.

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Inger-Anne Søfting, « The Sea Around Them: A Blue Reading of Ecological Coexistence in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4783

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Auteur

Inger-Anne Søfting

University of South-Eastern Norway

Inger-Anne Søfting is an associate professor in American studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway where she teaches American literature and culture as well as other anglophone literatures. Her PhD was in the field of African American literature and her dissertation focused on works by Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Currently, her research interests are American literature and the environment, and literature and human rights.

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