The Open Boat Literary Elements

Realistic fiction; Naturalism

The action takes place in a dinghy boat off the coast of Florida in January 1897

The narration assumes a third-person omniscient perspective that oscillates between an objective point of view and the point of view of the correspondent.

The tone shifts between matter-of-fact lyrical; the mood shifts from despair to hope to relief to grief.

The protagonist is the correspondent; the antagonists are his own mind and nature.

The major conflict is that the four men must fight for survival against their own despair and an indifferent nature.

The climax comes when the boat capsizes and the men must swim to the shore, resulting in Billie's death.

The correspondent finds four dry cigars in his pocket while another crew member finds three matches. The specificity of the number three foreshadows how one of the men will not make it to the shore alive.

The correspondent believes the sleeping cook and oiler resemble "a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood." This is an allusion to Babes in the Wood, a children's fairytale about two children who are found dead after being abandoned in a forest.

There are examples of parallel sentence constructions with the repetition in the following clauses: “Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed.” “Maybe they think we are out here for sport! Maybe they think we’re fishing. Maybe they think we are fools.”