SOURCE: Frederick, John T. “The Fifth Man in ‘The Open Boat’.” The CEA Critic 30, no. 7 (April 1968): 1, 12-14.

In the following essay, Frederick considers a few different critical approaches to “The Open Boat” and perceives the story to be “an intense paradigm of the human situation as a whole.”

I often wonder what other professed teachers of literature think and feel when they are confronted by the collocation of a large class and a masterpiece, and the implicit obligation to bring the two into some measure of significant relationship. Within the last few days I have read Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” for perhaps the twentieth and twenty-first and twenty-second times; and with each reading I have been for half an hour a fifth man in the little craft: weightless, adding nothing to the load that almost swamps it; incorporeal, opposing no obstacle to the movements of the four...