Man and Nature in Stephen Cranes The Blue Hotel and The Open Boat Essa

Man and Nature in The down in the mouth Hotel and The forthright Boat Stephen stretch uses a massive, ominous stove, sprawled out in a tiny room and burning with god-like violence, as a booster cable metaphor to communicate his interpretation of the world. Full of nearly restrained energy, the flaming stove is a symbol of the burning, potentially eruptive earth to which populace cling and of which they are a part. As a literary infixedist, Crane interpreted reality from a Darwinian perspective, and saw the earth drive by adamant natural laws, violent and powerful laws which are oftentimes hostile to humans and their societies, and he conceived of humans as accidents, inhabiting a harsh, irrational, good world. Cranes famous depiction of the world is this It is a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb (Crane 783). With both of his scam stories, The mettlesome Hotel and The Open Boat, Crane explores how humans react when the stove bursts and natural flames blaze furiously Crane sets two different separates of men into situations in which the laws of nature are against them. The natural laws that govern the weather and the ocean assault against a group of men who are trying, albeit in an exhausted dinghy, to diagnose the coast of Florida in the story The Open Boat. In The Blue Hotel, the animalistic laws that determine human behavior birth chaos among a group of strangers. One can readily see both similarities and differences in the reactions of the two groups of men to the world. That, in both stories, both groups of men are floor and yet charmed by the violence of nature is an essential law of similarity that in one story the men work together to prevent one another and in the other story the men overcome ... ...red A. Knopf Inc., 1992. Crane, Stephen. The Open Boat. The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane Volume V, Tales of Adventure. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Charlott esville UP of Virginia, 1970. Gerstenberger, Donna. The Open Boat An Additional Perspective. Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971-72)557-561. Gibson, William M., ed. The Red Badge of courageousness and Selected Prose and Poetry by Stephen Crane. New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950. Halliburton, David. The Color of the Sky A dissect of Stephen Crane. New York Cambridge UP, 1989. Johnson, Paul. Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. New York harper Colophon Books, Harper and Row Publishers, 1983. Kent, Thomas L The Problem of Knowledge inThe Open Boatand The Blue Hotel. American Literary Realism 14 (1981) 262-268.