Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Open Boat, Stephen Crane - Clarence Walhout (essay date 1987)

The Open Boat, Stephen Crane - Clarence Walhout (essay date 1987)

Clarence Walhout (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Walhout, Clarence. “Ives, Crane, Marin, and ‘The Mind Behind the Maker’.” Christian Scholars Review 16, no. 4 (1987): 355-72.

[In the following essay, Walhout utilizes a structuralist method to analyze “The Open Boat,” particularly exploring the implications of the last sentence of the story.]

The study of Ives, Crane, and Marin in this essay adopts what I would characterize loosely as a structuralist methodology. I say loosely because I do not wish to link my interest to any one of the particular structuralist models which fall under that rubric (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Greimas, Todorov, Barthes, etc.). I wish rather to use insights derived from the structuralist tradition to explore the formal affinities which seem to exist among three artists who lived and worked during the early years of the twentieth century. The structuralist tradition seeks to go beyond empirical description of...

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