SOURCE: Wolford, Chester L. “This Booming Chaos: Crane's Search for Transcendence.” In The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition, pp. 127-48. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Wolford asserts that “The Open Boat” illustrates Crane's shifting interest from cultural to individual aspects of the literary epic form.

Traveling Inward

Stephen Crane was nearly a writer of epic. Certainly he wrote the great American epic into The Red Badge, but then he wrote it out again, mocking accepted notions of heroism central to Western consciousness. Crane depicted archetypes of unconsciousness very early in his career, particularly in the Sullivan County, New York City, and Asbury Park sketches, where he approached transcendence only occasionally, as in “Killing His Bear.” Transcendence, when it appears, tends to exist in the stories separate from and unperceived by the protagonists, as in “The Reluctant Voyagers.” Later, in Maggie...