SOURCE: Schulman, Robert. “Community, Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to ‘The Open Boat’.” American Literature 50, no. 3 (November 1978): 441-60.

In the following essay, Schulman traces Crane's growing sense of community in his fiction, which culminates in his story “The Open Boat.”

Sixty years before Crane's “The Open Boat,” Tocqueville described the settlers of the virgin land: “The desire of prosperity has become an ardent and restless passion in their minds, which grows by what it feeds on. They early broke the ties that bound them to their natal earth, and they have contracted no fresh ones on their way.”¹ Alienated from the land, Americans also tend to be separated from each other. “Aristocracy,” Tocqueville observed, “had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it. As...