25 pages • 50 minutes read
Stephen CraneThe Open Boat
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1897A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Boat
The boat symbolizes vulnerability, as the title, “The Open Boat,” implies. The boat is “open” to danger and all that nature and fate can throw at the men on the craft. Since the boat is far from imposing, the size of the boat increases its precariousness. In the second paragraph, the narrator writes, “Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the Boat” (213). If the boat were mightier, perhaps the men would have more confidence; the confrontations of People Versus Nature and Survival Versus Fate and Powerlessness would not seem so lopsided.
The narrator also compares the dinghy to a “bucking broncho” and describes the craft as it “pranced and reared and plunged like an animal” (214). The jerky motions and the link to the animal reinforce the vulnerability of the people in the boat. The boat represents instability and unpredictability. The men don’t know what will happen to the vessel or their lives.
Conversely, the boat is also a home. As unsteady and weak as the boat appears, it gives the men a modicum of shelter and keeps them alive until three of the men make it safely to shore. The boat is where the men sleep and work together. With the captain in the role of father, the men come across as a cohesive family, and the boat, however defective, symbolizes their temporary family home and illustrates the theme of Community and Cooperation Versus Alienation.
The Dead French Soldier in Algiers
Although the narrator doesn’t explicitly mention the historical context of the story—Cuba’s revolt against the rule of Spain—Crane alludes to issues of colonization and war through the dead French soldier on the sand in Algiers, the capital of Algeria. Like Cuba, Algeria was a European colony—specifically, of France. French rule in Algeria was particularly brutal, and through the dead soldier, Crane illustrates the consequences of one country trying to impose itself on another. Crane’s historical context helps explain why the correspondent thought of the dead French soldier—many soldiers from Spain died trying to put down the Cuban revolt. What Crane doesn’t represent in the story is the toll on the colonized and the suffering, death, and oppression they faced due to foreign rule.
The correspondent does not think about the French soldier in these terms, however. For him, the poem about the soldier brings home the poignancy of the human condition. As a boy he did not view the soldier’s death with any particular emotion, but when faced with the possibility of his own death, he suddenly sees the soldier as an individual like himself and recognizes the depth of the soldier’s loss.
The Man with the Halo
The man who helps save the boat’s passengers appears to the correspondent to have “a halo about his head” (238); he also “[shines] like a saint” (238). These explicitly religious references contrast markedly with the rest of the story, in which religion is notably absent. The closest the men in the boat come to invoking religious belief are their discussions of fate and the “seven mad gods who rule the sea” (222), but these references don’t speak to faith in the Christian sense suggested by “halos” and “saints.” On the contrary, the men treat these things as synonymous with the arbitrary forces of nature; fate and the gods are “absurd” and “mad” because what is happening to the men lacks any sense of order or meaning.
The description of the men’s savior is therefore ironic. There has been no suggestion, throughout the men’s ordeal, that any benevolent power is looking out for them. However, the imagery also underscores the emphasis the story places on community and cooperation; angels and saints may not actually intervene to save people, but people can save each other in ways that are angelic.
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By Stephen Crane
