Why does Stephen Crane tell "The Open Boat" in the form of a short story instead of a nonfiction narrative? Why does fiction serve as a better...

Stephen Crane tells the story of "The Open Boat" as fiction rather than nonfiction for several reasons. By writing the story as fiction, Crane is able to spend a great deal of time on descriptive details. He explains the water, the sky, and the movement of the boat with vivid imagery. Crane is also able to delve into the minds of each of the characters, which is more easily done in fiction than nonfiction. In...

Stephen Crane tells the story of "The Open Boat" as fiction rather than nonfiction for several reasons. By writing the story as fiction, Crane is able to spend a great deal of time on descriptive details. He explains the water, the sky, and the movement of the boat with vivid imagery. Crane is also able to delve into the minds of each of the characters, which is more easily done in fiction than nonfiction. In this case, fiction serves as a better window of truth because Crane can enhance the drama of the situation the four men find themselves in as much as he likes. If he was bound by nonfiction, he could only tell the story as it happened; while he could add some details to show scene, he could not stretch the truth in any way or it would then be fiction, not nonfiction.

The final lines of the story are very important to the overall theme, which is that the three surviving men have come out of this experience stronger and now understand the sea in a way only they can. Crane writes, "When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters." By almost experiencing death on that boat, the surviving men spent so much time in the water that they came to understand every nuance of it—what each wave meant, what the color of the sky foreshadowed, etc. The men now can be interpreters of the sea in a way they could not before. By portraying these men as fictional characters and having them live and become interpreters, Crane lends more drama to the story and reveals deeper truths of survival.