Journal Entry for "The Open Boat"

Stephen Greene

English 48B

February 8, 2011

Journal #14, Stephen Crane

"The correspondent wondered if none ever ascended the tall wind-tower, and if then they never looked seaward.  This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants.  It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual-nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men.  She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise.  but she was indifferent, flatly indifferent"(pg1013, "The Open Boat").

"In 1896, Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after acting as witness for a suspected prostitute. Late that year he accepted an offer to cover the Spanish-American War as a war correspondent. As he waited in Jacksonville, Florida for passage to Cuba, he met Cora Taylor, the madam of a brothel with whom he would have a lasting relationship. While en route to Cuba, Crane's ship sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him adrift for several days in a dinghy"(Stephen Crane, Wikipedia).

The correspondent dreamily observes as he sits in the lifeboat heading towards shore.  He has just woken up from a night of waiting offshore, unable to navigate the waves on the coast at night.  The day before one of the people on shore had seen them and signaled by waving his coat, but had failed to help them or run to get help, he had simply faded into the gray dusk.  He awakes to see the shoreline spotted with black cottages and they find themselves forced to brave the crashing waves until the tiny boat can take no more, then swim into shore.  He, in a surprisingly calm state for the situation that he is in, the correspondent draws a connection between the tower of wind over the breaking waves and nature itself.

The first thing that stands out in this section is the correspondent's seemingly ridiculous, calm and speculative mood in the midst of a critical, life-threatening experience.  He does not focus on the significant challenge ahead of him: dragging his own thoroughly exhausted body to shore, avoiding the perilous surf separating him from safety, but rather on the enormous tower of wind, hovering above this scene, presumably with its back turned on humanity and its eyes gazing seaward.  The wind-tower is compared to nature, serenity in the midst of the futile struggles of the ants.  The language used and the description of nature as indifferent to human-kind, focused away from rather than towards the comparably tiny and insignificant humans, clearly display a determinist view of the world.  The people's, or 'ant's' struggles are useless, and even unnoticeable in the presence of this great towering invisible force of Nature.
This indifference that nature displays towards the human race is central to the correspondent's unusually calm attitude, as he now sees this wind-tower from the other side.  He sees the insignificance of the day-to-day struggles and attempts of people in comparison to the vast expanse of nature, specifically the wind and the sea.  Through a newly found, or simply awoken lens of determinism, the correspondent now has to need to nor any reason to worry about, or fight back against his situation.  He sees the coming events from a bird's eye view, perceiving the scale and his own, in fact all of humanities, actions.  From atop this wind-tower, nature sees the ants run around senselessly and ineffectively behind her back, as she gazes seaward into the distant, pervasive power of the ocean, of the wind, and of herself.