SOURCE: Ditsky, John. “The Music in ‘The Open Boat’.” NDQ: North Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 1 (winter 1988): 119-30.

[In the following essay, Ditsky delineates the musical qualities of “The Open Boat.”]

The interrelationship of music and literature is a subject that has long fascinated both laymen and the critics of both disciplines. Perhaps the fact that the two arts are so palpably similar in so many respects has been responsible for the difficulty of going beyond the patent without in the process becoming entangled in the technical verbiage peculiar to each form of expression. And yet, though the number of creative talents adept in both forms has always been relatively small, it has been common enough for practitioners in the one to dabble in the other: Shaw, we know, wrote music criticism, and Pound tried his hand at opera; while Ned Rorem and Virgil Thompson have been accepted as masters of the essay form. For the most part, however, writers and composers have held one another in rhapsodic if uninformed esteem, a romantic transport resembling awe—though on occasion, it proves critically useful to see what metaphorical and literal uses a writer (for instance) may make of the notion of music.¹ But when specific mention of music and its usages fails to appear in a literary text, there are still opportunities for constructive discussion of the “musicality” of that text, particularly when the clues are so numerous as they are in so celebrated a piece of fiction as that short story which some have considered America's finest, Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat.”²

For the purposes of this essay, I will respect the intelligences of my readers not only by assuming familiarity with Crane's text, but also by not indulging in the application to it of a highly technical, cookie-cutter jargon meant to wrench “The Open Boat” into a posture never intended by its author. Rather, I mean to move through the story as written, pointing out resemblances and insights when they seem clearly valid and appropriate. In so doing, I wish to move out of some initial understandings for which I am indebted to Anthony Burgess, who is of course not only an accomplished composer of music and writer of fiction—and an excellent critic of both—but who has also published a novelistic emulation of the structure (and, in certain places, even the notation) of Beethoven's “Eroica” Symphony, Napoleon Symphony (1974).³ I had myself considered expanding a conference paper on the relationship between the Beethoven work and the Burgess—until, that is, I read Burgess's own concise accounting of the case in his essay-volume This Man and Music.⁴ I refer the reader to this volume for a thorough, if personalized, examination of the implications of the sort of analysis just undertaken here; but what I want to take from Burgess, by way of starting point, are his statements of certain truisms about the music-literature interrelationship that need—even as truisms—to be accepted as true, and yet inadequate, before “The Open Boat” can actually be climbed into.

To begin with, Burgess observes that “Music and literature have this in common—that the dimension they work in is time” (41). Having said as much, he considers the fact that literature—as visible letters—seems to be an attempt to conquer space as well; yet Burgess concludes that “The reality of literature, as opposed to its appearance in written or printed records, is the organization of speech sounds, and this makes literature a temporal art, a twin of music” (41). Later on, Burgess repeats the truism that music is a matter of “tension and resolution,” then expresses the hope that his readers will have tired of a simplification that “leads us only to the prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat and, in infancy, the presence or withdrawal of the maternal voice” (83). Music, as a system of signs, must presumably be more than that. Finally, there is his repeated avowal of the importance of repetition in music, as in: “Sonata form depends on repetition, and repetition is what neither fictional nor historical narrative can accommodate—at least, not in the literal manner of music” (182). I would like to apply Burgess's remarks to Crane, at least by way of a beginning, by noting that Crane's story is “musical” in the way in which it “works” in time: that is, it not only unfolds over a period of described time, clock time, but also delineates the ways in which a psychological predicament can alter one's time sense, and thus teach a person to tell time differently. Moreover, literature may well be, as Burgess puts it, an “organization of speech sounds” that makes it “a twin of music,” but “The Open Boat” goes even further: it shows human speech, and human thought processes, being trained through experience to adopt the tempi set by a metronome of nature—the sea itself. Perhaps no writer before Crane has shown quite such an exquisitely sustained “tension and resolution” in his story, in other words, but if as a result we are led “only” to something like the “prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat and, in infancy, the presence or withdrawal of the maternal voice,” it might also be valid to observe that this time, the tension and resolution are carried out within and upon the medium of an amniotic sea. And finally, it will be argued that Stephen Crane's way of handling repetition—even “literal” repetition—is not only “musical” but also successfully narrational in both the “fictional” and “historical” senses.

“None of them knew the color of the sky” (885) begins Crane's story—one of the most famous beginning sentences in American literature. But only at the end of the third sentence, as formally construed, comes the completion of the remark: “… and all of the men knew the colors of the sea.” These phrases—actually, a phrase and its inversion—establish as do musical themes the material out of which a movement (there will be seven in all) of a composition will be formed. (The composition will in fact be more than a suite of haphazardly joined numbers, of course, since overall thematic unity will obtain even as rhythm and mood are allowed to vary.) Between the statement and its inversion, however, there appears the phrase “hue of slate” to describe the color of the sea, a phrase which—though on occasion shaded to “amber” and “emerald-green” and “foaming white”—becomes the motif for the first “movement,” whether as “slate,” “slaty,” “gray,” or “grays” (885-87). The tonality—the key, if you will—of this color of the sea establishes more than its objective selfhood; it also creates the subjective mood of four men who have not the time to check out the state of the weather overall.

The second paragraph establishes the tonality of the prose itself—by now pre-set for us, since the story is being told in the past tense:

Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.

(885)

This tonality is a matter of ironic distancing from the immediacy of the situation being described, an achievement already in place when the story begins. The absurd disproportionality of the remarks about the bathtub and small-boat navigation is being excused, at this point in the story, by no more than the “most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall” quality of the waves—as though dispassion can only be explicated through pathetic fallacy. The existential situation is quite other, as we are reminded in our look through the cook's eyes “at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean” (885).

But by now we are into our separate introductions to the four voices of this chamber piece. (Of course, we are welcome to call it a concerto for quartet and orchestra, the sea serving as tutti. Or we can consider the voice of the narrator as a fifth chamber instrument—one holding all the retrospective cards—and treat the whole as, say, a piano quintet.) The cook is given to habitual pronouncements, habitual reflex actions. The oiler, on the other hand, is although adept at handling himself at sea no less precariously positioned: his “thin little oar” is no greater a guarantee than the cook's “six inches of gunwale.” The captain, who is “buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy-nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down,” has already taken on the coloration of a specific memory: the sinking of his ship in the “grays of dawn.” Now his very voice has been altered by “something strange”: “Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears” (885-86). The correspondent, who as yet has not spoken, is described as watching and wondering. But the captain has already taken on the colors of the sea.

I have suggested that the voice of the narrator might be termed the fifth chamber instrument in this piece; but in fact, the past-tense narrational voice is identical with that of the correspondent—except that the voice of the narrator is able to recollect a learning process which the correspondent, as we observe him, is just beginning to endure. They are, in effect, two stages of the same attitude, separated only by the sinking-in of the meaning of the story's climax. The correspondent, we might say, is riveted in his attention by his existential plight; the narrator, with his limited-omniscient point of view, has passed beyond all caring and has learned what he and all of us are worth in the scheme of things. Of course, we must agree that Crane is correspondent and narrator both, since that is the way things really happened after the scuttling of the Commodore; but what “really” happened is less important than the fact that Crane identified his art as fictionist with his role as reporter. Four voices, in this story, emerge from a single narrational matrix—like arias, if you will, from recitative, except that they are always so brief—but that matrix comes to a single focus in one of them, if we turn our attentions that way, and it also takes its cues from the universal Ocean, should we turn about.

Throughout Section I of the story, then, the precariousness of the situation of the shipwrecked men is emphasized by their near-engulfment by a sea still seen as “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (886), and yet the narrator's retrospective voice both maintains this fiction of the anthropomorphic enemy in nature while simultaneously evidencing the effects of the overall experience through a tonality beyond all urgency; beyond concern, even: “A singular disadvantage of the sea” is being considered—nothing to get all that worried about. “In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been gray. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways …” (886); but this supposition presumes the leisure of observation from “a balcony,” whereas for the men in the open boat such painterly nuances can only be posited from the fact of the sea itself, which just as it lends its coloration to the faces of the men is also teaching them a new method, a new rhythm, of thinking and speaking.

Section II changes the notion of precariousness for one of relativity of experience. Section I's key of “must have been,” “must have,” is slightly altered to a degree that does not diminish the continuity of movements: “It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber” (887). The dispassionate narrator has to keep himself from seeing what his imagination makes it perfectly possible for him to “see,” but which his emphathetic presentation forbids him to enjoy. Hence Crane hedges; the sea's glories are presented as probabilities, like Debussy in the subjunctive. The captain's responsibility has already taken him further along the road to indifference than the other men in the boat, and we are told that he “chuckled in a way that expressed humor, contempt, tragedy, all in one” in asking the others if they thought they had a chance—which causes the others to answer cautiously, eschewing optimism as “childish.” Yet the captain, “soothing his children,” himself assures them that they will indeed “‘get ashore all right’” (887-88). But implicit in the captain's reassurance is an indifference to what state they will be in when they arrive ashore; they may be like sparrows which fall under the eye of the Creator, but which fall nonetheless.

And speaking of birds, we might here allude to the gulls which settle on the sea in sight of the uneasy passengers of the open boat. They are part of a pattern of imagery Crane sustains throughout this section especially, one which contrasts the men's situation with various pockets of relative safety. The gulls are envied by the men, “for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland” (888). The gulls are easy in their environment because it is their own, and because they recognize no “wrath of the sea”; therefore, they might as well be safely inland, since they admit no personal peril. The oiler tells one gull, which lands atop the captain's head, that it is an “‘Ugly brute’” which might have been, from all appearances, “‘made with a jack-knife’” (888). When the captain gets the gull to fly away, the other men are relieved because they had found the bird “gruesome and ominous,” but the by-now-imperturbable captain has been concerned about nothing more weighty than his hair (888). Relativity, then, and the dulling effects of repetition, are the main themes of this section: “In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed. … They rowed and they rowed” (889). A lighthouse appears, so specklike that only a desperate person would even be able to see it; the captain orders the cook to bail, “serenely,” and the “cheerful” cook accepts his orders.

What Burgess has described as mere “tension and resolution” is being carried out here, but with a difference. The “prenatal experience of the maternal heartbeat” is being applied, by the unthinking sea, to the situation on which these uneasy men find themselves; they grow, in Section III, to a discovery of their commonality, rather than their uniqueness. A “subtle brotherhood of men” is being established “on the seas” (890). As the distant lighthouse grows so much that “It had now almost assumed color” (891), the captain casually suggests—from the calmness into which he has retreated—that they use his overcoat on an oar as a kind of sail, and so off they fly towards the coastline. When the cook tells the captain that he thinks that the life-saving station they are headed towards has been abandoned, the captain replies with bland acceptance, “‘Did they?’” (891). The captain's resignation—as though he were blissed-out on some sort of drugs—is beginning to spread to his men; and of course the narrator is already on-site beforehand. He recites the problems attendant upon shipwrecks: the lack of training therefor, and so on; the fact that in their “excitement” the crew would have also “forgotten to eat heartily” (891). In this particular movement, there is interruption from an unexpected source: “Finally, a new sound struck the ears of the men in the boat. It was the low thunder of the surf on the shore” (892). But this interruptive chord does not intrude upon the men's “cheerfulness” for long; the correspondent discovers that he possesses eight cigars, a fitting four of which are still worth smoking, and the section ends in a male sacrament of sorts, a kind of child's first communion:

After a search, somebody produced three dry matches; and thereupon the four waifs rode impudently in their little boat, and with an assurance of an impending rescue shining in their eyes, puffed at the big cigars and judged well and ill of all men. Everybody took a drink of water.

(892-93)

Section III thus ends with the foursome having formed some sort of quasi-religious congregation, a superficial harmony having been established as the men head towards the new menace of the unattended surf.

For there is in fact no life-saving station there or anywhere nearby, and the narrator reminds us of this truth in the midst of recounting the men's ritual repeatings of “‘Funny they don't see us’” early into Section IV of the narrative. By this time, it is evident that Stephen Crane is not making any attempt to divide his story into sections naturally structured in purely naturalistic, temporal terms. His fully cinematic, blackout-based divisions are wholly arbitrary, and are always based upon exigencies of tone and theme rather than those of time. In this sense, Crane is clearly trying to supplant time's dominance in narrative with one based upon mood; it is shifts of mood which regulate the tonalities of Crane's seven sections, not those attendant upon narrative chunks merely. Crane's movements are musical ones. They follow upon announcements of new changes in approach, attitude, or angle. They depend heavily for effect upon repetition, often of an exact, literal sort; and if they establish internal coherence for themselves as movements, they are also part of an overall system determined not only by the main plot line—in which much and yet surprisingly little manages to occur—but also by the dominant image of the open boat itself.

And yet a reader might quite properly object that Crane's construction is as dramtic as it is musical: that his sections resemble blackout episodes in some existential play. Indeed, the language is frequently ironic enough, as it deals almost comically with issues of life and death, to remind one of Beckett. But by the same token, the unifying device of the open boat is so ideal a symbol of the naturalists' view of the human condition that it also appears, if I remember rightly, in the work of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Specifically—to return to the internal development of the lengthy, central Section IV—Crane uses the repetition of “‘Funny they don't see us’” to heighten the men's growing awareness of the extremity of their plight, or rather to stave off the admission of its true nature. The “slim” lighthouse shows its “little gray length,” while the “surf's roar was here dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty.” The men agree, chorally, “‘We'll swamp sure,’” but though they are said to invent epithets separately the reader is left to imagine the sound of this aleatory passage. The passages we do “hear” tend to be such repetitions as the captain's double-beginning (“‘If we don't all get ashore’”) or, more remarkably, the narrator's imputation to the foursome of thoughts which begin with repetition (“‘If I am going to be drowned …’”) and continues with such patent silliness (“‘… as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?’”) that the conclusion (“‘The whole affair is absurd’”) acquires special poignancy; there is a sad comedy, Crane shows, about a man wanting “to shake his fist at the clouds” (893-94).

Now the billows of the offshore surf are heard: “There was a preparatory and long growl in the speech of them” (894). The oiler, who is to die at the story's ending, hears this voice and understands its meaning, for he is “a wily surfman.” As the boat returns to open sea, the men become embroiled in an argument over the meaning of the activities taking place ashore where life goes on in seeming unconcern for the men's situation—a situation now again defined through repetition, first of the word “rowed” (895, 898), then of the word “coat” (897)—the word is subjected to a Pinteresque deprivation of meaning as the men try to interpret what a man's waving a coat to them from a distance must mean. As visible colors change from “yellow” to “saffron” to “black,” the men retreat into an ironic tension between their spoken conversation, which is carefully restricted to the rigors of saving their own lives, and their interior thoughts, which are expressed through absurd, obsessive repetition:

“If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?”

(898)

Both unspoken thoughts and spoken, ritual utterances have long since taken on the cadences of the sea itself, as well as of the corollary of that rhythm, the endless necessity to row, and row, and row. At the end of Section V, however, the cook has the temerity to break with the mood of obsessive concentration upon the efforts at survival by bringing up a subject out of his own private musings: “‘Billie,’ he murmured, dreamfully, ‘what kind of pie do you like best?’” (899).

This “wrong” note ends the section, and its successor begins at once—“played without pause,” as the musical equivalent would be described. The oiler and the correspondent react “agitatedly” by shouting “‘Pie!’” back at the cook and demanding that he not talk about “‘those things’”—the things of normal existence. But the cook compounds the offense by answering, in a Stan Laurel manner, “‘Well, … I was just thinking about ham sandwiches, and—’” (899). The topic of this section is the growing sense of shared predicament that comes to pervade the men's consciousnesses—shared fate, to put it more strongly. Yet it begins with musical irony—in discord, like the musical “sneeze” that begins Kodály's Háry János Suite. It is a discord quickly set aside, as the cook lapses into a silence that becomes general. Indeed, the narrator takes over, radically altering the mood and the rhythm at once: “A night on the sea in an open boat is a long night” (899). The succession of long vowels banishes all frivolity, as the quartet (c-, c-, c-, and o-, according to occupational initials) settles into a rhythm of effort, the rules of which require a willing acquiescence in requests that one man “spell” another (899-900). Eventually, the brotherhood of effort seems to falter when, with all the others seemingly asleep, the correspondent finds himself apparently “the one man afloat on all the oceans. The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end” (900).

Out of this ominous soundscape comes a sight, that of a shark (though Crane heightens the effect by not naming it, but rather showing us simply its fin cutting through the water in the vicinity of the boat), almost as if the correspondent, left alone with his fears, has projected them by means of visual soliloquy—as often happens to Shakespeare's tragic heroes. There is also an eerie accompanying sound—a “whirroo.” As abandoned by his sleeping comrades as Christ at Gethsemene, the correspondent looks at the shark with a certain objective admiration, and “The presence of this bidding thing did not affect the man with the same horror that it would if he had been a picnicker. He simply looked at the sea dully and swore in an undertone.” Still, he would rather not have had to “be alone with the thing” (901).

Section VI begins abruptly, turning the events that conclude its predecessor into matter for thought. The opening paragraph is a recapitulation of the “theme” from Section IV (“‘If I am going to be drowned …’”), minus its “‘sacred cheese’” reduction of man to mouse. The thought pattern, apparently that of the correspondent, is summarized by the narrator: dying, after so much strenuous effort, would simply be unfair, if not indeed an affront. If nature were to show herself, she would be greeted with jeering, hooting—and with pleas. Whereupon an answer is given, or felt to have been given: “A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation” (902). Reversing music's procedures, a sight (a presumptive one at that) is taken for a sound; Crane again takes the critical experience of one of the four men and harmonizes four voices upon it—in the process echoing the substance of his own poetry. For the foursome, “Speech was devoted to the business of the boat”; but in the mind of the correspondent there arises, “To chime the notes of his emotion,” a long-forgotten verse: a quote from someone else's music and recognized as such, but also known as apposite in its new context as never before. Aria-like, it is a change of texture palpable as the one in Whitman's “Lilacs” elegy, but instead of being a rising to the sublime, it represents a sudden identification with a standard bit of popular verse, Caroline Sheridan Norton's “Bingen on the Rhine.” The plight of the “soldier of the Legion” dying alone in Algiers without any hope of seeing his native land again had entered his memory in the context of the “dinning” of his schoolmates, but now, it strikes him as “a human, living thing,” “stern, mournful, and fine” (902-03). Art, even a banal popular variety, can provide a release of human sympathy which nature herself denies. The correspondent finds that “He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers” (903).

As if to tally his new note of human solidarity, the captain rouses, making it evident that the correspondent had not in fact been alone with the shark after all. The rhythm of the “‘Will you spell me?’” question and answer resumes; indeed, this reappearance of a theme from Section V helps move the narrative to its climax of action (its climax of meaning having already been largely achieved). Sound buttresses event, as the “ominous slash of the wind and water” and “the crash of the toppled crests” bring the presence of the shoreline—and its attendant dangers, the boat being as highly likely to be swamped as it is—into the flow of sound. The section ends with a final repetition of the ritual reinforcement of existential mutuality:

“Billie! … Billie, will you spell me?”
“Sure,” said the oiler.

(904)

Section VII begins with both sea and sky having returned to the “gray” of the beginning of the story. The correspondent sees a windmill on shore, and his writer's mind converts it into a symbol for “the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual.” A “giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants,” the tower was, like nature, neither “cruel,” “nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent” (905). Seeing nature as no antagonist—editing the pathetic fallacy out of his thinking—the correspondent now looks at the possibility of his own drowning as little more than a potential “shame” (906). The experience of attending nature's concert, as I would like to put it, which he has just about finished going through, has left him humming nature's tune. We hear a brief allusion to a theme from Section II, the captain's instruction to the cook to bail, and the cook's assenting reply (906). Then the men jump into the surf; a paragraph begins and ends in a manner formally reminiscent of the story's opening: “The January water was icy … The water was cold.” And briefly, nothing is heard but the “noisy” water, but then, the correspondent is able to observe his companions, with the oiler “ahead in the race,” and the cook—still placidly taking the captain's orders—turning himself into a living “canoe” by riding in on his back and using his oar once again, thus making a triumph out of a learned tempo (907).

The correspondent sees the shore ahead spread out like a picture, and is impressed by it the way a gallery-goer might be by “a scene from Brittany or Holland”—the latter sometimes printed as “Algiers” (908). He finds himself still tempted to think of his own death as “the final phenomenon of nature,” and surely does not wish to be hurt even in the act of dying; but he also pays reflex heed to the captain's injunction to “‘Come to the boat!’”—the story's last-introduced refrain (908). Obeying this call, answering the demands of its motif, saves the correspondent's life, for he is subsequently thrown over the foundering boat and into the surf—where he is helped to stand by a naked man whose fortuitous appearance makes him seem not the indifferent natural phenomenon he might otherwise seem—“naked as a tree in winter” as he is—but rather other: “… a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint” (909). The correspondent expresses gratitude in one of the “minor formulae”: “‘Thanks, old man’”; then he sends his savior after the oiler, who by some paradox into which one would otherwise have been tempted to read meaning, has been drowned in the surf as if his wiliness did not exist. Interestingly, the oiler's body is described as lying along the shoreline in such a posture that the forehead lies upon “sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.” It is as if the narrator, or the correspondent, or the reader, is being offered one last chance to read intentional irony into the death of the oiler at the “hands” of the sea; it is as if (for things happen this way in literature) the sea is either making final mock of the “wily” oiler's knowledge of the surf, or granting him an arrival ashore on its own terms, that is, by subjecting the seat of his intelligence to the implacable rhythms of its own great factuality. The land, for its part, can offer (if offer it can) “only … the different and sinister hospitality of the grave” (909).

So much for the penultimate paragraph of “The Open Boat.” This, rather famously, is the final one:

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.

(909)

The story ends with a sound, a musical note. What is more, that sound is not unexplained as to source, as is the mysterious noise that ends Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, but specifically credited to the sea as its “voice,” just as its waves are given the anthropomorphic quality of having “paced to and fro” a line above. In this paper dedicated to the examination of the musical qualities of “The Open Boat,” it is of course fortunate that the story as an entity concludes aurally. But does Crane imply a sustained note? A chord? A bit of noise one could supply by means of magnetic tape? Crane does not make the nature of this final, resolving note clear, and that would seem to be part of his strategy. After all, we might be as determined as Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage to read an augury of divine promise into an appearance of the sun, and we might therefore scramble as assiduously as possible—like teachers of literature, perhaps—to “interpret.” But what in fact has the sea “said” in the end? No more, one suspects, than “I am.” Or, what is more to what seems to be Crane's own point, “Am.” In any event, there is no denying the musical quality of Crane's ending upon a resolving tone.

The seven sections of “The Open Boat,” then, evince a relationship with musical structure even beyond the natural resemblances cited by Burgess, and they are certainly more sophisticated and original than those literary works which are simply about the world of music, or which merely allude to it (e.g., certain volumes by Mann, Cather, Steinbeck, etc.). Burgess's own Napoleon Symphony, for that matter, is both ingenious and slavishly imitative of its model, yet it is not as daring in its use of repetition as Crane's story is. Moreover, Crane's alternation of moods and themes throughout his seven sections, together with the ways in which he interrelates those sections through recurrences of materials, is evidence of considerable constructional ingenuity. We may never be able to agree on the degree to which Crane consciously and deliberately pursued the informing of literature by means of borrowings from another art form, then, but we can at least acknowledge that the literary craftsman Stephen Crane was also by instinct a creator of music.

Notes

1. I attempted as much in two articles published in The Journal of Narrative Technique: “Music from a Dark Cave: Organic Form in Steinbeck's Fiction,” 1, 1 (Jan. 1971) 59-67; “‘Listening with Supersensual Ear’: Music in the Novels of Willa Cather,” 13, 3 (Fall 1983) 154-63.

2. Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” in Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: The Library of America, 1984) 885-909.

3. New York: Knopf, 1974.

4. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. As with Crane's work, page references are contained parenthetically within my text.