This part of the story, with its non-referential dialogue, reads like a modern absurdist drama. Much as Fleming senses his unimportance in battle in The Red Badge of Courage, the men in “The Open Boat” confront an indifferent universe, best represented by the “high cold star on a winter’s night” that afflicts the correspondent with a cosmic chill and the abandoned wind tower that stands “with its back to the plight of the ants.” Nature “did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.” Only in its final sentence, with three of the men safe ashore, does the story open the possibility of genuine communication: “they felt that they then could be interpreters.”

But, in a final irony, only three of the four men reach shore safely. As they maneuver the boat toward shore and it capsizes in the surf, the “oiler was ahead in the race” as the men swim to the beach. That is, he is among the “fittest” who ought to survive according to the Darwinian paradigm. Crane’s own Darwinian beliefs are nowhere more evident than in his poem “The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers” (1899), a parable in which those who gather “great heaps—/ Having opportunity and skill” are “Stronger, bolder, shrewder” than the feeble, who gather only “chance blossoms.” Ironically, however, there seem to be exceptions to Darwinian “law.” The oiler is the only one who dies in the surf while trying to reach shore. He dies, as Solomon suggests, “because he did not retain the lesson of the sea that he learned while in the boat—the value of group action—and because, obeying his own hubris, he deserted the group at the end.”26 Or perhaps he is simply unlucky, a chance victim struck by the dinghy when it is flung ashore by a wave.

More than any other American writer of his generation, Stephen Crane pointed in the direction of literary modernism. What other author before the turn of the twentieth century would have depicted the men in the open boat from a point of view above them on the open sea? Yet Crane adopts precisely that perspective at one moment in the story: “Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque.” The modulation in point of view stuns the reader, much as Hemingway would surprise his audience when, in the middle of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), the narrative abruptly shifts to the point of view of a lion. Little wonder that Hemingway considered Crane the author of two great short stories, “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel.” Hemingway also reprinted The Red Badge of Courage in its entirety in his anthology Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (1942) because he thought it “one of the finest books of our literature.”27 Little wonder, too, that the modernist poet John Berryman published one of the first Crane biographies in 1950. Stephen Crane’s best writing appeals to a modern sensibility and, like vintage wine or choice brandy, it seems to grow more subtle the longer it ages.

NOTES

1 . The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 323.

2 . Correspondence, p. 99.

3 . W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, 8 June 1895, pp. 532-33; Hamlin Garland, “Books of the Day,” Arena 8 (June 1893), pp. xi-xii.

4 . The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871-1900, ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New York: Hall, 1994), pp. 91-92.

5 . George Wyndham, “A Remarkable Book,” New Review 14 (January 1896), pp. 30-40; [Edward Marshall,] New York Press, 13 October 1895, V, p. 5; Harold Frederic, “Stephen Crane’s Triumph,” New York Times, 26 January 1896, p. 22.

6 . Correspondence, pp. 207, 249, 214.

7 . Edwin Oviatt, “J.