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Lack Of Knowledge In Stephen Crane's The Open Boat

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The Open Boat was not just a creative short story, it was the portrayal of Stephen Crane’s own experience as a survivor of a shipwreck of the Commodore. The characters in the story were highly influenced by the actual crew members, along with Crane himself. The Correspondent, who was the survivor of the shipwreck, was Stephen Crane; the Captain was modeled after the real-life steamship captain, Edward Murphy; the Oilier was one of the crewman of the Commodore and was modeled after the real-life oilier; and the Cook another crewman of the ship who bailed water from the lifeboat was modeled after a man named Charles B. Montgomery. This short story is about how man has deal with trying to beat nature, the men go through a growth of thought …show more content…
In section IV tells the reader how the men are frustrated of the unknown, they are not sure if they see the house of refuge, Crane's biggest dilemma was the lack of knowledge. “It is fair to say here that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction; but the men did not know this fact, and in consequence they made dark and opprobrious remarks concerning the eyesight of the nation's life-savers. Four scowling men sat in the dinghy and surpassed records in the invention of epithets” (Crane 5) The barriers to human community was in fact the mind and the reality of all. This statement shows how the men lack in their knowledge, and how the readers are more certain to understanding the situation of the men not knowing what is the unknown. It's not in the way that they interpret the signals but if the signals are the right facts; “As part of the human reality of their situation, the men are sometimes mistaken, baffled, or uncertain, just as they are often perceptive, skillful, and above all cooperative. Against great odds they row, bail, have their hopes raised and dashed, see colors, shapes, and shadows exactly, somehow see on the horizon the dot that is the lighthouse, somehow solve the "problem in small boat navigation" each precipice of a wave poses, and sometimes argue in circles about what constitutes a signal” (Shulman 454). The men also think they see a man ashore waving a coat supposedly telling them to go north because they think there is a life-saving station up there but they are still left in the unknown mind of what the man on shore was supposed to be and the day soon turns to night leaving them stranded in the sea. “At first angered that "nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him," the correspondent moves beyond his "wishes to throw bricks at the temple" and accepts that

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