The Open Boat

“A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and, by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared and plunged like an animal.”

Crane uses a simile to compare the boat to a wild Spanish horse. He reinforces the instability of the boat and uses imagery—precise language that creates a sharp picture—to illustrate the boat’s dizzying movements.

“‘Oh, well,’ said the captain, soothing his children, ‘we’ll get ashore all right.’”

The captain acts as a father figure to the other men on the boat, trying to comfort them as if they were his children. Crane turns the relationship between the men and the captain into a metaphor here, highlighting the broader theme of Community and Cooperation Versus Alienation.

“‘Ugly brute,’ said the oiler to the bird. ‘You look as if you were made with a jack-knife.’ The cook and the correspondent swore darkly at the creature.”

Through dialogue, Crane expands the people versus nature theme. The men experience conflict with more than the sea, as their anger at the bird indicates a larger war. With a simile, the oiler likens the bird to a jackknife, which furthers the violent tone of the story.

“In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed. They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar.”

The physical toll of struggling to survive at sea manifests through repetition, underscoring the theme of Survival Versus Fate and Powerlessness. The correspondent and the oiler must constantly row the boat to keep them, the captain, and the cook alive.

“It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him.”

The men on the boat are a community or fraternity. Although they don’t talk about their bond out loud, the men feel it in the boat and inside them, as the brotherhood brings them warmth in the face of the icy waters.

“‘None of those other boats could have got ashore to give word of the wreck,’ said the oiler, in a low voice. ‘Else the lifeboat would be out hunting us.’”

The men form a community, but they also experience alienation and isolation since no one is looking for them. The ironic word choice—a lifeboat would only “hunt” them in order to save them—underscores the men’s emotional state with violent imagery.

“‘If we don’t all get ashore,’ said the captain, ‘if we don’t all get ashore, I suppose you fellows know where to send news of my finish?’”

The captain’s tone changes from upbeat to pessimistic as he admits that not everyone might survive. The captain’s dialogue also works as foreshadowing: One man, the oiler, does in fact die in the shallow water.

“I’d like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like socking him one, just for luck.”

The narrator doesn’t explicitly attribute this quote about the people at the resort to a specific character, but it’s reasonable to assume the belligerent oiler says this. The hostility reinforces the men’s alienation from civilization and reframes the people versus nature theme, expanding the men’s conflict to include regular civilians.

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.”

The men suffer not because nature hates them but because nature doesn’t care about them. Crane personifies nature by turning it into a woman indifferent to their fate, subverting the more typical depiction of nature as maternal. The men realize they’re disposable: They could die, and the world would continue running without a glitch.

“The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.”

The correspondent’s thoughts of the dead French soldier in Algiers allude to colonialism: the historical context that pushed the correspondent and the other men to try and travel to Cuba. There’s also foreshadowing since the dead soldier hints that someone else might die later.

“She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.”

The correspondent takes up the idea that nature is indifferent to the lives of the men on the boat. His thoughts add to his characterization as a man of perception. The notion also reflects the influence of Naturalism in its suggestion that nature isn’t inimical—it simply has no reason to concern itself with the four men on the boat.

“The tumbling boiling flood of white water caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water swarmed in from all sides.”

Imagery and personification highlight the ferocity of the sea. Crane creates a keen picture of the sea assaulting the boat as if the sea were an army carrying out a full-throttle attack.

“The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but 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”

Juxtaposition highlights the difference between the atmosphere on the beach and the consequences of the shipwreck. The former is jovial, but the latter is gloomy since a death occurred, and Crane alludes to the oiler’s demise and burial through the image of the “dripping shape.”