The open boat
Four men struggle for survival after escaping from a sinking ship and into a small open boat.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2012–2020years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The open boat by Stephen Crane is amazingly well written
- It's kind of sad that PG couldn't get anything more than that out of the short stories he read in high school english. Sure, a lot of them are forgettable, but if I think think of the stories I read that stuck with me, they all had a heck of a lot more going on than just being a random slice of mundane unhappiness. A few that really stuck with me: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (James Thurber), The Open Boat (Stephen Crane), The Long Sheet (William Sansom). If PG couldn't find anything funny, gripping, or worthwhile in stories like these, well, his loss.
It wouldn't even be worth making this comment, except that PG seems to consider himself some sort of authority on writing (http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html) - and for him, the one and only rule of style seems to be simplicity. I'll agree, simple beats overwrought, but c'mon. Great writers have a style that makes you want to copy it, which is something that PG doesn't seem aware of even as an aspiration.
- The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane. Ecclesiastes. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. All would be considered "classics", all have much to recommend them, and none is so long that you'd lose interest.
- It's really sad that philosophy isn't a core part of the US curriculum and I can't figure out why that's the case. We were required to read plenty of novels that attempt to be philosophical, but analyzing them was always a nightmare because it's completely subjective. Is this paragraph literal? Symbolic? Metaphorical? Nothing at all? In many cases the author never explains, so there's no way to know. Everyone is free to project their own opinions onto everything.
I still remember being extremely frustrated when our teacher kept telling us it was "ironic" that the most physically fit character drowned in Stephen Crane's The Open Boat (sorry for the spoiler). It wasn't ironic at all because he was foolish, and foolish people get themselves killed all the time!
