The Open Boat [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the main points of the story but leave out a lot of the details.]

"The Open Boat: A Tale Intended to Be after the Fact, Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore" is a short story written by Stephen Crane. It was published in 1897.

The plot of this story is very easy to summarize. Four men are in a lifeboat after their ship sinks in a storm. The captain is injured, and so it is up to an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent to get them to land. Land is actually not far away, but nobody seems to be there to guide the boat to shore safely. The story involves how they achingly keep the boat just outside of view of the shore, wondering if they will have to drown out there, despite actually seeing land. Eventually, they just decide to make a rush for it and just barely make it there alive. One person does show up and does everything he can to save the four men.

What I did not tell you in this summary is what makes the story worth reading. The author goes heavily into what it was like physically and mentally to suffer this fairly short stint of survival. It is wonderfully detailed to the point where you can really empathize with their situations. The author also goes into the concept that no human on this planet really thinks they are going to die. They may say they know it will happen or whatever, but they have no actual concept or true realization of it inside them--possibly some sort of built-in defensive mechanism. It takes a moment like this where you are forced to confront it and possibly accept it for that realization to actually be genuine. This concept was the most philosophically interesting bit I got from the story.

A weird thing happened with this one. It got more interesting after I was finished reading it. Despite the story being written in the third person, it is actually a true story. The correspondent was the actual author. Stephen Crane was in that boat! It kind of makes sense. He writes what the correspondent was thinking, but only shows outward observations of the others. The great thing is that this really could have passed as fiction, and I would have never been the wiser.

I absolutely recommend this story. It is a great survival story, the some of the philosophical aspects about life and death are also really interesting too. Kind of an eye-opener.

This blog was written on July 28, 2026.

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