Metress on The Open Boat

In His editorial, “From Indifference to Anxiety: The Knowledge and the reader in “The Open Boat”, Christopher Metress makes the argument that Crane uses the structure of the story to move  the reader “from indifference over epistemological  frustrations to a point of unresolvable anxiety” (Metress 1) . He goes on to state that key moments in “The Open Boat” create an inequality in the amount of knowledge that is known by the crew versus the reader; thereby, creating anxiety for the reader.

                    Metress is absolutely correct in his argument. It is clearly evident that Crane purposely wants the reader to sit wondering exactly why he neglected to explain what the crew could then be interpreters of. To show how obvious this is, Metress uses the narrator. Early in the story, the narrator steps in to inform the reader that there was indeed no life-saving station, a key argument between the crew, within twenty miles of their location. Granting the reader this knowledge “severs the epistemological equality of the reader and the crew: the two no longer share the same anxieties over the problems of knowledge raised by the crew's struggle.” (Metress 2) He goes on to state, that this severing of the equality, as the reader had only know what the crew had known up until this point (and nobody knew the color of the sky), causes the reader a feeling of privilege. Classic irony. While the crew wastes time arguing over a life-saving station, the reader knows that it doesn’t even exist. This feeling persists until the final sentence of “The Open Boat”. In the final sentence, Crane manages to switch the inequality completely. Ending the story with "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 the shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters" (Crane) shows the reader that they really know nothing. Metress explains how this causes frustration in the reader: “Stripped of anticipated knowledge and anxious about their own epistemological inequalities, readers must now ask why it is that the characters (and not they) have achieved interpretation.” (Metress 3) Crane likely left the reader in frustration to show them that they really have no idea what the crew went through, and reading a story about it would never allow them to fully understand the situation.