SOURCE: Monteiro, George. “The Logic Beneath ‘The Open Boat’.” The Georgia Review 25, no. 3 (fall 1972): 326-35.

In the following essay, Monteiro argues that “The Open Boat” is an exploration of the fragility of human existence and the fickle nature of fate.

Coming at last to the conclusion that man's freedom lies somewhere between Fate and, as he termed it, a “Beautiful Necessity,” Ralph Waldo Emerson turned to the figure of shipwrecks and castaways to convey his sense of the individual human being's precarious hold upon life within the province of Nature. “I seemed in the height of a tempest to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there,” he wrote. “They glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the...