Stephen Crane's "An Open Boat", successfully attempts to explain one of the most prominent questions, which has faced the mankind since its beginning: Why do events occur, and can we, as human beings, do in facing them? In this story, men are trapped on a boat in the middle of an ocean, and the story shows how they struggle to survive, fighting the nature's power. Stephen Crane, as a naturalist writer, proposes that occurrences in life are due to nature's indifference to our fate, and the only way to overcome our would-be doom is to exercise free will and our own survival instincts.
             The setting and imagery of "The Open Boat" is key to the development of Crane's theory. Trapped in a small boat adrift off a coast in hostile weather, the characters find themselves battling the forces of nature. The sea, symbolizing life, consistently confronts the crew with challenges, and as in life, "The roar of the surf was plain, and sometimes they could see the white lip of wave as it spun up the beach."(5) Moreover, the men are trapped in a small boat, no larger than a bathtub, which inevitably collapses under the stresses of the sea, symbolizing the need for the man as an individual to confront nature and his fate, and not rely fabrications protect him. To setup the imagery of isolation of the island, the author uses description "a tiny house was blocked out black upon the sky."(6) Color black, usually referred as negative, foreshadows the future events and experience through which the sailors will have to go through. And so does "the slim lighthouse"(7), situated on the beach, which "lifted its gray length"(7), foreshadowing the gray, dull experience ahead of them. The men see the lighthouse to be "slim" and "gray", which again foreshadows their tiny, slim and tiny of them escaping the situation they a
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