Student Question
What impressionistic elements are in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"?
Quick answer:
Crane's "The Open Boat" is a story about courage and survival in the open sea. Crane presents the story in such a way that the reader cannot be certain of who survives, or even if all do. There are four men, who have capsized their lifeboat when it was being rowed out to a ship they were supposed to board. The men work together to row back toward land. However, they are not sure where they are because there is no sun or stars overhead with which to navigate. They have limited food and water.
Impressionism in literature applies to the use of a few select details as sufficient to convey the sensory impression of an incident or scene. Much like Impressionistic art, suggestion and atmosphere prevail over detail. Like the painter, the author describes, rather than interprets the impressions, sensations, and emotions that constitute a character's mental life. In composition, the main object commands the viewer's attention.
Stephen Crane's story, "The Open Boat," interestingly, is based upon a real incident in Crane's life in which he was a passenger on a ship that sank off the coast of Florida; he and four men were in an open dinghy, struggling on rough sea for thirty hours. Recording this human struggle in an indifferent universe, Crane utilizes, among others, these impressionistic techniques:
COMPOSITION
Most clearly, the entire focus on the struggle against nature is suggested in the opening line: "None of them knew the colour of the...
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sky." Also suggested is the "subtle brotherhood of the men...on the sea." The interplay of the characters on this dinghy is, indeed, central to the composition of Crane's Naturalistic narrative.
ATMOSPHERE
Crane's use of grey tones creates the atmosphere of an indifferent universe in which the men struggle for their lives against a threatening nature. The "canton-flannel gulls" come close to the men and stare at them "with black bead-like eyes." There are "brown mats of seaweed" which appear after the "slaty wall of water"approaches. Even the men's faces are of this tone: "In the wan light the faces of the men must have been grey"; as the oiler rows, he is depicted vaguely as "Grey-faced." The man on the shore is described as a "little black figure."
SUGGESTION
With a remarkable use of rhythm in this story, Crane constantly suggests and reminds the reader of the motion of the sea. Phrases have a distict sense of rising and falling, each one different in length, just as are waves:
As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high....Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.
Even in his character development, Crane does not make the reader privy to any individual's personal interpretation of the experience, for only in the end can they "grapple fundamentally" with their experience:
The correspondent did not know all that transpired afterward. When he achieved safe ground he fell, striking the sand with each particular part of his body. It was as if he had dropped from a roof, but the thud was grateful to him.
More important to Crane is the capturing throughout the narrative of the sights, sounds, and emotions of the possibility of death so powerful that it is incomprehensible, only creating a series of impressions upon the occupants of the small boat that is open to the fury of nature in an indifferent universe.