The Open Boat - Stephen Crane

What I found to be so intriguing about Stephan Crane’s ‘The Open Boat”, was how Crane portrayed the different ways the men dealt with the crisis at hand. Each of the men knew that they would most likely not survive, yet each of them handles this reality differently. The character of the correspondent chooses to spend his final moments smoking a cigar as he observes the state of the other men onboard. By doing so, the correspondent is almost pulling himself out of the horror around him and instead of participating in his demise he becomes an aloof observer. The cook chooses to talk about pie as a coping mechanism for his impending death. Perhaps the cook focuses on pie because cooking had been his life and is something that is familiar and comforting to him, unlike the scenario he faces aboard the boat. “I am going to be drowned – If am going to be drowned – If I am going to be drowned, why, in the same of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” (Crane 349). This phrase is repeated several times throughout the story, perhaps as a way to rationalize their death through the belief of a higher being. If the mean can somehow believe that it is the will of nature or of God that they must die aboard the ship than perhaps they are comforted. Believing in a higher power is a coping mechanism that an extraordinarily large number of people use; if life and death are out of the men’s hands and into the hands of something more powerful. They men may feel more at peace with their death because it was meant to be. Either way, Crane has explored the vastly different ways people react to death in a story that encompasses humanity’s greatest fear.