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The bottom of the sea is cruel.
-Hart Crane, "Voyages"
As many critics have argued, questions of perspective and epistemology are central to Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" (Kent; Hutchinson). The story's first sentence famously clues us to this: "None of them knew the color of the sky" (68). But behind the uncertainties of perspective is a determinable ontology, a presence, or rather, I shall argue, a sort of presence, the existence of which implies a rectified aesthetic response. This response emerges, however, from negations, denials, and occultations: what is not seen, who is not there, and what does not happen.3 Here again, when we look at nature we behold things that are not there and miss "the nothing that is."
Fully as much as Stevens in "The Snow Man," Crane is concerned with certain conventions of representation: personification, the picturesque, the American sublime, and the melodramatic, which although it does not inform "The Snow Man" is played on in Stevens's "The American Sublime." Crane's story is intertextual with nature poetry, sentimental poetry, hymns, and landscape art, as well as with Darwinism, theological clichés, and, less obviously, theological actualities. For the most part these conventions add up to what the Stevens poem declares is "not there." To get to "the nothing that is" we must first traverse this ocean of error. Doing so helps keep our perspective not on the men in the boat but on the "real" (with the scare quotes actually meant to be scary) ocean. If the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story's central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than human perspective.
In a passage in section 1 of "The Open Boat" the sea is depicted in an orgy of hyperbolic personifications:
A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not...