SOURCE: Rath, Sura P., and Mary Neff Shaw. “The Dialogic Narrative of ‘The Open Boat.’” College Literature 18, no. 2 (June 1991): 94-106.

In the following essay, Rath and Shaw use Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic to analyze “The Open Boat.”

In 1884, commenting in Longman's magazine on the “organic wholeness” of fiction, Henry James wrote that “a novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts” (“Fiction” 15). To achieve this narrative cohesion, he later prescribed the use of a “central intelligence” that would open one privileged window to the “house of fiction” and illuminate the characters and incidents for the readers (“Preface” 46). But if in his zeal to focus the meaning(s) of a work and thus justify the...