Interlude: The Agony of Play in "The Open Boat"

TLDR: Crane's "Open Boat" (1897) as mentioned in this paper describes the experience of men from the sunk steam ship "Commodore" and the story of how those men, cramped together in a lifeboat, wage a battle, raging, against their doom.

Abstract: 'An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man,\" the narratot remarks, near the close of Stephen Crane's \"The Open Boat\" (1897), that famous account of \"the experience of fout men from the sunk steamet 'Commodore,'\" the story of how those men, cramped togethet in a lifeboat, wage a battle, raging, against their doom.' To the correspondent, once struggling in the boat to gain the surf, now struggling in the surf to get to shore, the upturned tenfoot dinghy could become a life-preserving float, as it has for the captain, \"clinging with one hand to the keel\" (5:91). More likely, it could become a lethal obstacle—as, historically, it did for the oiler William Higgins.2 In either case, the boat is not a toy. The severity of the story's narrative situation would seem to obviate such a point: who, reading about four men laboring for their lives against an \"indifferent, flatly indifferent\" natural world (5:88), would entertain the idea, as this contest draws to its close, that the dinghy in the waves off-shore is simply an object to be played with? And yet the narrator feels compelled to