Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Open Boat, Stephen Crane - Edwin H. Cady (essay date 1980)

The Open Boat, Stephen Crane - Edwin H. Cady (essay date 1980)

Edwin H. Cady (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: Cady, Edwin H. “After The Red Badge of Courage.” In Stephen Crane, pp. 145-60. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

[In the following essay, Cady surveys Crane's fiction after The Red Badge of Courage and regards “The Open Boat” as one of his best literary achievements.]

That sense of the ambiguous sublimity of courageous life in the face of the common fate, and the Maggie theme of the tragic needs for pity and solidarity, became the centers of all the rest of Crane's great work. Except for a few poems, his future greatness was all to come in the short story. The one possible exception to that generalization would be George's Mother. In length it is a nouvelle, as Henry James called the form, at the most. But then, The Red Badge is hardly more; and one apologizes, if apology is ever needed, for the lack of complexity, of rich social involvement, which is...

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