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Analyzing Naturalism

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34 views2 pages

Analyzing Naturalism

Uploaded by

alonsofernandez585
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Student Name:

Analyzing Naturalism

After you have finished reading "The Open Boat," answer these questions. Be sure to provide quotes
from the story to support your answers when directed to do so by the question.

1. Summarize the story’s plot. In what way does the plot express themes common to naturalism?
Four men who are lost at sea in a boat and attempting desperately to reach land.

2. In the space below, copy and paste a passage from “The Open Boat” that expresses a principle of
naturalism explicitly rather than implicitly.
"The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was colder than he
hadexpected to find it off the coast of Florida. This appeared to his dazed mind as a fact
important enough to be noted at the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was tragic.
This fact was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it
seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold."

3. In the space below, copy and paste a passage that expresses a theme or principle of Naturalism
implicitly. Then in your own words, state the theme that is suggested but not stated directly in the
passage you chose.
Naturalistic prose, which started in the 1800s, is an evolution of the realist and has many
things in common with it, since it starts, like the realist, from the desire to depict reality
accurately but differs in the philosophical background behind the naturalistic works. Naturalist
writers believe that human behavior is regulated by factors of heredity, environment and the
pressure of the moment, with the result that the heroes of their works are presented as people
who act based on their inner instincts (mainly hunger and sexual desire) and under the
influence of social and economic conditions. Naturalistic works also stand out for the overly
detailed rendering of reality, even in particularly violent scenes, and often for the tragic end, in
which the hero is usually led to destruction.
Student Name:

Analyzing Naturalism
4. What “saves” the correspondent, cook, and captain in the end? (Why do they survive but not the
oiler?)
The thing that eventually saves the people, in the end, is the fact that they hung on to the boat.

5. How does the structure of the story support its theme?


"The Open Boat" is structured in seven sections, each with a different point of view on the four
men's predicament: being stranded at sea on a small boat. The men are initially angry about
their plight, and then they grow to feel empathy for one another. Stephen Crane initially uses
long sentences to set a slow pace to the story. These long sentences are reflective of the long
arduous journey that the men face in the small boat, trying to survive every incoming wave.
This pace is most evident in the sixth section of the story where the correspondent is awake
and alone in thought while the other three crewmates are asleep. In the last section, the pace
quickens, and Crane uses shorter sentences. These short sentences coincide with the frantic
attempts of the men to reach the shore.

6. What effect does the story’s structure have on readers?


The effect that the structure has is to draw the reader in so that they can begin to relate to the
feelings of the men only to be compounded by the obstacles that the men continue to face
until they come ashore.

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