Dec 21, 2009

The Open Boat | For the Record: Text and Picture in The Open Boat

In the following excerpt, Monteiro asserts that ‘‘The Open Boat’’ derives not only from Crane’s personal experience, but from his creative response to literary and other artistic sources as well.

Only the most primitive critical response would insist that Crane’s fictional treatment of his experience of shipwreck off the Florida coast on New Year’s Day 1897 could have been drawn directly and transparently from immediate life, that the author, moreover, had only to recall the details of existence aboard the small open boat, along with his moment-by-moment reactions to his plight and situation, to produce his ‘‘tale intended to be after the fact,’’ as he described the story. In this note I shall attempt to show how in two key instances in ‘‘The Open Boat’’...