Battling The Sea

Lauren Grotpeter
Mrs.Franke
English 1100
11 Jan 2009
Battling the Sea
When stories are read, sometimes it is hard to distinguish elements that the stories have in common and what they do not. “The Open Boat”, by Stephen Crane, is a story based upon Crane's experience as a correspondent shipwrecked while on a challenging to supply Cuban revolutionaries in 1896. “The Open Boat” is a story of four men stranded out on the sea in a lifeboat battling the violent sea for many days and struggling to survive. “Everyday Use”, by Alice Walker, was published early in her career and by some critics been called the best of Walker's short stories. The story tells of a mother and her two daughters' conflicting ideas about their identities and ancestry. These stories, although with different plots, have some similar elements of literature and some that are different.
The characters in these stories have their own personalities and ways of communicating with others to produce the way the story flows. In “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane splits the story into the perspective of four characters: the correspondent, the captain, the cook and the oiler, Billy Higgins. The correspondent is a mocking observer, as he watches the crew members work hard to get the boat ashore. The cook is fat and rambles on about what foods he is craving and what he wants to cook. The captain is morose and indifferent, while the oiler is strong and burly. As they begin the long swim to the beach, the captain, correspondent, and the cook swim together and hold onto the parts of the boat, while Billy, the strongest of the group swims ahead and alone and is later found dead on the beach. The moods of the men fluctuate from anger at their desperate situation and what they see to be hostile. All of these four men show a great deal of teamwork and loyalty for the need to survive. In “Everyday Use”, there is a mother and her two daughters.
      In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working...