Comparison Of South Of The Slot And The Open Boat

This week I chose to read and evaluate Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Jack London’s South of the Slot. Both of these short stories benefit from the versatility of the third person point-of-view but differ from each other in a few striking ways. Jack London writes in third person limited, restricting himself only to the thoughts and feelings of Freddie Drummond. It is advantageous because the unique nature of Drummond’s research allows London to explore and describe life on both sides of the Slot, and the class and labor struggles resulting from there. London can give ample attention to how Drummond interprets these struggles because time is not wasted switching between multiple characters. In this way, the story unfolds in a way that
is both concise and insightful, while still allowing readers to benefit from multiple perspectives. This is clearly shown when London writes, “So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a genuine denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-conscious as the average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab even exceeded that of the average loyal union man. During the Water Front Strike, Freddie Drummond was somehow able to stand apart from the unique combination, and, coldly critical, watch Bill Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen.” As you can see, both Freddie Drummond’s impartial analysis of life South of the Slot and Bill Totts’s direct involvement in that life are brought to light without space being wasted on two separate viewpoints. On the other hand, while Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat is tentatively written from the point-of-view of the correspondent, and in this way is also third person limited.
I found The Open Boat to be even more restricted, almost suggestive of the theme that no one can truly know anything. For example, sentences were written by Stephen Crane such as, “In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been gray,” suggest a narrator other than the correspondent, who should easily have been able to see the faces of the other men. Other passages, such as, “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him,” suggest an omniscient narrator with direct insight into the minds of each of the shipwrecked men. This unusual approach to narration and point-of-view by Stephen Crane, so different from the more standard third-person limited approach used by Jack London, fueled the themes of uncertainty and existentialism present in The Open Boat. From the vague perspective of the correspondent, Stephen Crane gave readers a chance to see the situation from the viewpoints of four distinct character archetypes without delving too deeply into any single one. While South of the Slot focuses entirely on a single character and his in-depth analysis, The Open Boat gives us multiple takes on the tragedy of being shipwrecked and the struggle
to survive while eschewing the detailed analysis favored by Jack London.