Comparing The Open Boat And The Blue Hotel

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In this universe, there are a lot of things to observe at any given place and any given time. What any man tries to do is to observe others whenever they’re in a setting with other people. Benjamin Franklin once said “Observe all men, thyself most”. To do that, one must be able to make observations of others, including oneself, and pay attention to the actions of the other. When a person makes observations of an event and everything that was in it, he can then contemplate on his own actions and reflect on the event. This is what Stephen Crane, the late nineteenth century author, attempts to do. Through the use of the characters in “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel”, Crane reveals himself as a character through his own view and observations. The correspondent and the Easterner are both literary self-portraitures of Crane. When Crane depicts the characters, he illustrates his very own actions and thoughts. In doing so, through reflecting on the correspondent and the Easterner, Crane…show more content…
The narrator makes many observations of the characters but doesn’t go into the thoughts of his ensemble of characters, except for the correspondent. We only learn the thoughts of the correspondent. This is because the narrator knows the thoughts of the correspondent and is even able to narrate them, “the correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat” (Crane 62). This all comes down the one thing: the narrator is the correspondent, as both are Stephen Crane himself. The correspondent is a literary self-portrait of Crane, as the story is based on a true event, so the actual correspondent, is Crane himself. This ultimately means that the story is told from the perspective of the correspondent, or Crane, and all that observations he

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