The Open Boat Literary Analysis

Oh how could fate possibly lead me to this? This could not be it! Why have I been lead to this unfortunate circumstance? This cannot be what I am destined to accomplish. Writing this essay…there could be nothing worse! Well, I mean there are worse things, I guess. I could be stuck at sea, ready to drown and be put out of my misery at any given moment. My little, meaningless, insignificant life could be held in the vast unforgiving palm of nature. Which actually happens to be exactly what is happening in Stephen Crane’s short story The Open Boat. The story chronicles the struggle of four men lost at sea. The main character, the correspondent, has quite the crisis about half way through where he realizes he could very well die at any time. Not
When Siddhartha goes to visit Kamala he begins to notice her aging facial features and is made aware that he has grown older too. This triggers him to begin to fear death and old age. When he leaves Kamala he has a nightmarish dream where he throws out a dead songbird. Siddhartha awakens, and begins to associate the dead songbird with everything that he once understood to be valuable within him, deeming it “worthless and senseless.” In this line “A shudder ran over his body, then it entered inside him, and so he perceived that something had died.” Siddhartha is discovering the emptiness that has been forming in the space where the pleasure of power and possession once stood. Siddhartha develops a sense of dissatisfaction with the life he has been living and decides to leave town, only to grow furthermore depressive and irritated with his
This turns over in his head resulting in him saying the line “Yes, but I love myself.” The correspondent goes on to survive the failing dinghy and arrive alive and well on the shore of a beach. However, Billie the oiler did not endure the cruel indifferent manner of nature. In the last sentence of the short story Crane writes “The wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could be interpreters.” This is an interesting way to end the story, but it gets the point across. Although all the men knew they could die at any moment, being stranded in the middle of the ocean isn’t exactly the most fortunate circumstance; it was not something they wanted to believe. That was made incredibly obvious through the character of the correspondent. However, the death of the oiler made it clear to all the men that nature does in fact regard them as insignificant, tossing them into a waste bin with the rest.
However not in an ocean, Siddhartha does find clarity through a body of water. After wandering off from his home, he stumbles upon a river where he attempts to commit suicide. As he is drowning himself in the river he begins to feel “Om” meaning “the perfect completion.” Realizing his mistake, Siddhartha pulls himself out of the river to settle under a tree and fall asleep. When he wakes,