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The Open Boat Essay

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The Open Boat Essay
The story The Open Boat was written by Stephen Crane. This short story was based in a real story that he had when he was traveling to Cube. He was to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent, during this trip the ship sank off the coast of Florida, and he and three other guys saved their life. In the story he put the same characters, the correspondent, which is himself, that is why everything turns around him, the captain of the ship, the cook and the oiler, everyone has a different personality and in this essay I am going to be describing the characteristics of each characters.
First I am going to talk about the correspondent, and as I said before, he is the main character, because everything turns around him. He's the one who is telling the story from what he sees. The correspondent is a reporter that when he finds himself stuck in the ocean he didn’t have a positive attitude. His attitude starts to change later when the four guys create a good relationship between them and start to work as a team and each one of them is assigned a task. His job in the group is rowing with the oiler.
When he starts to have a good relationship with the others he starts to have faith that someone will rescue them, and that keeps him working hard, but later he start losing his faith that someone will rescue them.
The captain is a really important character in the story, even if he is injured; he still has an important role for the rest of the crew. He doesn’t really talk a lot. He represents an authoritarian figure, he is the kind of person that everyone trusts. He is really sad because he failed on his mission of keeping his ship safe, but he tries to act strong for the sake of the remaining survivors and he tries to support the crew with the strength that he has left.
The cook was a secondary character. Just like the other characters his work is really important to keep the boat working. Even if he is not mentally and physically strong, because he was overweighed, he also helped with the harsh jobs at the boat. He helped on things like bailing water. He really desires to get back to land. He immediately starts to daydream about how wonderful it will be when they reach land again when he noticed the presence of the lifesaving station.
The oiler is the character who works the most in the whole story. He has a heroic attitude. The oiler is portrayed as a good man with strong principles, his strength is essential for the crew because he does most of the physical work. He is really obedient to the captain. He is the one that is more realistic, always keeping in mind what they have to do, and what are their possibilities to survive. He was the one that inspired everyone, and made them more confident, and he also kept everyone together. As we saw every character in this story has a different personality, while one do the hard work, the other doesn’t but that didn’t mean he didn’t help, like the captain he was injured, so he couldn’t do hard works but he is authoritarian figure, and he tries to be strong for all the crew. Also the correspondent’s attitude was not the best, because he wasn’t positive, but oiler was, ha was realistic but he inspired the others and made them more confident. As I said, he every character was different from each other, but everyone was essential to keep the boat working.

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