In the lifeboat

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In the Lifeboat (Original The Open Boat ) is a short story by the American author Stephen Crane (1871-1900), which was originally published in June 1897 in Scribner's Magazine in New York . The story appeared again in 1898 as the cover story in the collection The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure and later with The Red Badge of Courage (dt. The red for bravery , even the red Bravery Medal ) in the anthology The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Prose and Poetry recorded. A German translation by Hans Reisiger first appeared in 1948 under the title Im Rettungsboot .

In the story, Crane processes his own experiences as a survivor after the sinking of the tug Commodore on January 2, 1897.

content

After the shipwreck of the tug Commodore near the Florida coast , the ship's captain, the ship's cook, a machinist and one of the passengers, an unnamed newspaper correspondent , try to reach the coast of Florida in a small open boat. The story vividly depicts her thirty hour struggle for survival on the raging seas. Your initial hope of being noticed from a headed lighthouse and of receiving help soon vanishes. Despite the rampant desperation, the four castaways do not give up their seemingly hopeless fight against the forces of nature. Immediately before they manage to reach land, their lifeboat crashes in the surf. With an almost heroic effort, the four mobilize their very last strength to swim through the surf. While the captain, the cook and the reporter manage to reach the safe shore, the machinist dies at the exact moment he comes ashore.

interpretation

The narrative begins suddenly with the sentence: “None of them had a look at the color of the sky.” Only the second sentence provides information about the situation in which the protagonists of the short story find themselves: “Their eyes always peeked flat out and did not get away from the waves that were constantly racing towards them. ” The impact of the paradox is, as Oppel notes in his interpretation of the short story, unmistakable: completely surrounded by water and sky, the shipwrecked see one thing , but not that other. The sky remains invisible to them and, as will be shown later, “mute”. The personal narrator initially sticks to seeing the situation through the eyes of the shipwrecked, who are exclusively focused on the impending waves. In an antithetical coincidence, the slate-colored waves with their foaming white on the ridges are contrasted with the colors of the sea that the men knew. With the help of poetic elements, the intensive reliving of the story is effectively secured from the start. What is told there and should be relived by the reader is the fate of people who are “at the mercy of the doom of the raging sea” in a “community of fate”. The sky marks in a concrete spatial concept a region that is hidden from the view of the men surrounded by the storm waves remains, but in metaphorical use - according to Oppel - shows that none of them has a reliable knowledge of the relationship of the individual to the universe or to cosmic forces such as God , fate or foresight. At the end of the story stands "the renouncement of wanting to say anything absolutely reliable about the possibility of man , nature and the universe."

According to Oppel, the lifeboat is characterized by “a high degree of compositional unity” and a “high degree of artistry” in the narrative structure with an “unusual concentration on the situation of the castaways”; The short story is entirely in keeping with the characteristic requirements previously defined by Edgar Allan Poe for this narrative form, aiming at achieving a “single effect ” (i.e. a unique effect), which is precisely how it differs from a purely journalistic report. The entire history of the shipwreck is hidden; the perspective is narrowed exclusively to the four occupants of the boat and their thirty-hour storm journey, everything is seen from the inside, as it were.

The narrator keeps himself in the background, there are only a few passages in which an authorial commentary can be found in terms of narrative technique ; the reader only receives some orientation aids in order to be able to understand the world of feelings of the characters. So it is called z. B. in the entrance passage of the story: “Someone may have a bathtub larger than the boat that danced here on the sea.” This almost sarcastic comparison with the bathtub corresponds to the feeling of forlornness that comes over the castaways and creates one ironic tension with the aim of showing the contradiction between human hope and unswerving reality.

In addition, the narrator refrains from clearly differentiating the four companions of fate according to type and character. The four men are dependent on each other for better or for worse in their joint endeavor to save their lives despite the adverse circumstances; Differences between rank and education no longer play a role. It is all about turning the tide in their favor in the desperate struggle against the forces of nature. The increasing despair is expressed in the question of the “why”, which - once heard - runs through the story to its end. The shipwrecked meets their hostile fate in the form of the unleashed forces of nature, against which man can do little; The focus is on the question of the meaning of human existence and the laws governing human beings.

Nevertheless, Crane is not only concerned with the relationship between man and nature, but also with his relationship to his own kind: “It would be difficult to describe the restrained brotherhood that had awakened between the four men here in the middle of the watery desert. Nobody said it. But she was there in the little boat, and everyone felt a little warmed by it [...] and they were friends - friends in a stronger sense than usual, cohesive fellow destinies. "

In the deeply felt tension between loneliness and human solidarity, the reporter remembers the verses of the dying Foreign Legionnaire in Caroline E. S. Norton's poem Bingen on the Rhine , in which a soldier experiences his death as absurd because his lover is waiting for him back home Life ends before actual fulfillment. For the reporter, the death of the Foreign Legionnaire is a further sign of "the terrifying indifference of the universe that inexorably circles its circles without being impressed by the fear and hope of mortal creatures," writes Oppel in his interpretation of this key passage in the story.

In the end it is the machinist, the boldest swimmer among the four castaways in the surf, who finds death; he deserved to survive not less, but rather more than the others; his death is utterly pointless. Apparently, according to Oppel, Crane wants to show "that ethical or other qualities are completely irrelevant when a person gets caught in the machinery of extra-human violence."

criticism

In 1980, Manfred Durzak praised the German-speaking countries for having “condensed the struggle of the four castaways with the relentless sea in turmoil into one of the classic texts in the history of the American short story” in his short story. ”He also writes:“ The unparalleled fascination that Crane's text broadcasts consists in the fact that the struggle for survival of the men, who stubbornly oppose the turmoil of the elements, but still tame the barely tamed lifeboat, relinquish themselves in the endless struggle against storms and ocean waves, specifically without applied tendencies to simulate an existential confrontation between humans and nature. Nature is not only declared to be a monstrous enemy of humans from the perspective of those who are hopelessly fighting and shown from the psychological perspective of those affected, but is also captured in its grandiose inhuman power, even in its beauty in pictures of poetic precision and unheard-of impressiveness. "

Daniela Götzfried wrote in 2008: “Stephen Crane, a contemporary of O'Henry , made it his goal to develop the journalistic report in such a way that a prose emerges that shows an ambiguous course through an exact description of the process and gives a lasting impression of reality can. In his master story In the Lifeboat , he seems to have succeeded in this conception. Through the exact description of the external situation, he implicitly conveys an existential situation and an associated superficially unrecognizable event ”.

Impact history

Stephen Crane (painting by Corwin K. Linson, 1894)

In all of Crane's oeuvre, Im Lifeboat is the one of his works that is often praised in the Anglo-American world by literary scholars , critics and other poets alike and has been included in several anthologies . For example, The Open Boat was published in 1927 in Wilson Follett's twelfth volume of Crane's Collected Works, in 1952 by Robert W. Stallman in Stephen Crane: An Omnibus and again in 2000 by M. Myers in Stephen Crane: an anthology in memoriam (1871–1900) released. There are numerous reviews in the English-language press that emphasize the special importance of this story, for example in the New York Times , where it is said that Crane was given a high place in American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries simply because of this short story .

As Manfred Durzak points out, the poetic genealogy of Im Rettungsboot reaches back to Poes A Descent into the Maelstroem (Eng. Down in the Maelström also Der Sturz in den Maelstroem or Im Wirbel des Maelstöm ) and is taken up again in German post-war literature , for example in Ernst Schnabel's short story One Hundred Hours Before Bangkok or Siegfried Lenz 's Moods of the Sea .

Dietmar Haack refers in his comparative analysis of Crane's story with the short prose Ernest Hemingway to the " parallelism of the technical principles of Cranes and Hemingway" and sees in this respect Crane as a forerunner of a development that reached its climax with Hemingway.

In an interview, Hemingway himself expressly expressed his own interest in Crane's entire oeuvre and especially in The Open Boat . He commented in an interview with Kandisky who put him on a safari questions about American writers to Crane as follows: ". [He] wrote two fine stories, 'The Open Boat' and 'The Blue Hotel'" (dt. analogously: [He] wrote two excellent stories, 'In the lifeboat' and 'The blue hotel')

Historical background

A small steamship sits at dock, mast and smokestack visible and the cabin facing front, with an almost identical boat on its right.
The Commodore

When it was first published in Scribner's Magazine in June 1897, the story was subtitled "A Tale Intended to be After the Fact" (ie a story that seeks to relate to the original factual experience), although it could not be clarified beyond any doubt whether it was Addition really comes from Crane himself.

The subtitle alluding to the historically documented event that Crane in the sinking of the tug "Commodore" at dawn on January 2, 1897 as a passenger even witnessed while he was a correspondent of Bacheller's Syndicate on their way to Cuba was to discuss the local Report rebellion . Of the 27 passengers and crew, only the captain Edward Murphy, the machinist Billy Higgins, the cook Charles Montgomery and the reporter Stephen Crane survived, who reached land around noon on January 3rd in a tiny lifeboat, completely exhausted.

After a sensational press report in the New York Press , Crane himself published his own version of the events, which was reprinted in the January 7, 1897 issue of the New York Press under the title "Stephen Crane's Own Story" has been. In this newspaper report, Crane reduced his own role to that of a mere observer and focused on Captain Murphy and the machinist Higgins, whom he portrayed as heroes in the article.

After his own experiences in the lifeboat, Stephen Crane left the realm of speculation after his early story An Experiment in Misery in The Open Boat ; the relationship to the originally factual experience indicated in the subtitle switches off speculation with this reference. However, this does not mean, as Haack emphasizes in his analysis of the narrative, that Crane “slavishly clings to a factuality that can only be an ideal image anyway .” According to Haack, Crane tries to process his experience in the narrative, but tries to convey this “ to transport it into a literary short form without losing the truth content, which does not necessarily provide 'objective' facts, but does not want to deliver the truth to manipulation by the writer. "

Others

James Thurber published the short story MS Found in a book in 1950 . It was primarily about a first edition of Stephen Crane's The Open Boat , which Thurber allegedly received from a friend who in turn bought it for a quarter from an antiquarian bookstore in Columbus . In the nested encoding of this narrative, Thurber declared the edition to be authentic , as it contained a sealed letter that CN Bean had sent to Mr. Remo, in which he described a discussion with Crane in Havana in 1898. However, Thurber was primarily referring to Edgar Allan Poe's second short story MS in this story . Found in a Bottle (also a Bottle ).

literature

  • Martin Dolch: The Open Boat . In: John V. Hagopian, Martin Dolch (eds.): Insight I • Analysis of American Literature , Hirschgraben Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 36-41.
  • Dietmar Haack: "The real thing": Notes on a representation principle in Stephen Crane and Hemingway . In: Paul Goetsch (ed.): Studies and materials for the short story. Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 76-84.
  • Horst Oppel : Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 191-204.

Web links

Wikisource: The Open Boat  - Sources and full texts (English)
  • The Open Boat , adaptation of the CBS radio program Escape (1953). (English audio text), accessed on October 19, 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information in WorldCat and Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 194 and 403.
  2. ↑ Stephen Crane: In the Lifeboat Narrative . Published by Hans Hennecke. Translated by Hans Reisiger. Müller and Kiepenheuer Verlag, Bergen 1948. Crane's short story has since been translated into German several times and is easily accessible in various short story collections of American narrative literature in German-speaking countries. In the translation by Anneliese Dangel from 1957, for example, the story was again used in the anthology American master stories published by Martin Schulze in 2011 in Cologne's Anaconda Verlag , ISBN 978-3-86647-701-8 , as a licensed edition of the (East) Berlin construction Published by the publisher.
  3. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 195.
  4. ↑ quoted from the translation by Reisiger, Stephen Crane: In the lifeboat · narrative . Müller and Kiepenheuer Verlag, Bergen 1948, p. 5.
  5. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 191.
  6. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 192 f.
  7. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 194–196 and p. 198.
  8. ↑ quoted from the translation by Reisiger, Stephen Crane: In the lifeboat · narrative . Müller and Kiepenheuer Verlag, Bergen 1948, p. 5.
  9. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 197.
  10. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 198 f.
  11. ↑ quoted from the translation by Reisiger, Stephen Crane: In the lifeboat · narrative . Müller and Kiepenheuer Verlag, Bergen 1948, p. 11.
  12. ↑ On the intertextual references, cf. the more detailed description in Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 201.
  13. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 202 f.
  14. ↑ Manfred Durzak: The German Short History of the Present: Author Portraits - Workshop Talks - Interpretations , Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-15-010293-6 , p. 219 f.
  15. ^ Daniela Götzfried: The genre short story . Grin Verlag Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-638-89714-3 , p. 7.
  16. ↑ See the explanations in Michael W. Schaefer: A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Stephen Crane . GK Hall & Co. New York 1996, ISBN 0-8161-7285-4 . Likewise z. B. Richard M. Weatherford: Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage . Routledge. New York 1997, ISBN 0-415-15936-9 .
  17. ↑ Manfred Durzak: The German Short History of the Present: Author Portraits - Workshop Talks - Interpretations , Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-15-010293-6 , p. 220.
  18. ↑ See in detail Dietmar Haack: "The real thing": Notes on a representation principle in Stephen Crane and Hemingway . In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story. Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 70ff.
  19. ↑ Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, New York 1935, p. 22. Quoted here from Dietmar Haack: “The real thing”: References to a representation principle in Stephen Crane and Hemingway . In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story. Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 70f.
  20. ↑ Cf. Dietmar Haack: "The Real Thing": Notes on a principle of representation in Stephen Crane and Hemingway. In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt et al., 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 64-75, here p. 69.
  21. ^ Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 194.
  22. ↑ See in detail Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 194f. See also the presentation by Dietmar Haack: “The real thing”: Notes on a presentation principle by Stephen Crane and Hemingway . In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story. Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 69f.
  23. ↑ See detailed information and evidence from Horst Oppel: Stephen Crane • The Open Boat. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 195.
  24. ↑ Dietmar Haack: "The real thing": Notes on a representation principle in Stephen Crane and Hemingway . In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story. Diesterweg Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., 3rd edition 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 69f.
  25. ^ Bermudian , August 1950, Letter from the States . See in detail Stephen K. Hoffmann: Sailing in the Self: Jung Poe, and "MS. Found in a Bottle". In: Tennessee Studies in Literature. 26, 1981, pp. 66-74.
  26. ^ Burton R. Pollin : Poe's Seductive Influence On Great Writers. iUniverse, New York 2004, p. 135.
  27. ↑ Stephen K. Hoffmann: Sailing in the Self: Jung Poe, and "MS. Found in a Bottle". In: Tennessee Studies in Literature. 26, 1981, pp. 66-74.