SOURCE: Meyers, Robert. “Crane's ‘The Open Boat’.” The Explicator 21, no. 8 (April 1963): 60

In the following essay, Meyers argues that critical studies of “The Open Boat” have overlooked “the degree to which the tale seems to invert conventional Christian motifs and rituals while it traces the development of a new religion.”

It is common to interpret Stephen Crane's short story “The Open Boat” as a naturalistic reading of life, as the author's “apostrophe to the new Darwinian cosmos of blind forces—of chance and cosmic indifference” (Maxwell Geismar, Rebels and Ancestors, p. 99). Few will quarrel with this judgment. What may have been overlooked is the degree to which the tale seems to invert conventional Christian motifs and rituals while it traces the development of a new religion.

There would be nothing in this to occasion surprise. Crane toys with inversions of Christian themes in his novel The Red Badge of...