The Open Boat Vs Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and was a pilot on the Mississippi River. After publishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, he published his realistic picaresque novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. Shortly after, naturalistic impressionist Stephen Crane published a short story “The Open Boat” after his experience as a correspondent on the Commodore. Two decades later, Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. Each work has its strengths and weaknesses, and while all three are unique, they share a common thread of bleakness. “The Open Boat” presents a situation of survival in which four men create their own society in a dinghy. The first bleak view is that nature is chaotic, as shown by waves that

One on side, the river is a nurturer giving transportation and food, leading Huck to say, “We had mighty good weather” as “[w]e catched fish and talked . . . drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs” (55). However, it is a force of nature and the source of some of their misfortunes. It leads Huck and Jim to a wrecked steamboat housing murderers and takes their raft once they’re aboard the wreck (56, 60). Later, Huck and Jim are separated because of a “solid white fog” and shortly afterward, the river takes their canoe and leads them in the path of a boat (69, 79). Without the canoe, they board the raft, but the river leads them into trouble again; “as Jim went overboard on one side and [Huck] on the other, [a boat] come smashing straight through the raft (80). On the river, the pair is free from the church and state’s mandates for how society functions and how people should think, act, and live. Widow Douglas and Miss Watson try to teach Huck about society and “sivilize” him (3). Huck understands society’s view because “something inside of [him] kept sayin, ‘There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it, and if you’d a done it, they’d a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire’” (178). However, there is hope to bypass this society. A person can choose to ignore society’s rules and ideas and be kind or even help a slave, and Huck does. Ending his internal wrestling, he says, “I’d got to decide betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right then, I’ll go to hell’” (179). Like Crane, Twain shows the bond of brotherhood and the goodness of human nature. Jim “would always call [Huck] honey, and pet [him], and do everything he could think of for [him],” and Huck sees past his