| Major American sea narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth century collectively reject the archetypal model of redemptive suffering through a transformation of iconic and aesthetic representation. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor weaken romantic conclusions through realistic framing and ironic devices, in turn allowing for the more overt rejection of redemptive myth in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf and Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat." In the wake of the cataclysmic philosophical revelations during the late nineteenth century, The Sea-Wolf and "The Open Boat" present a redrawn paradigm that places renewed importance on suffering as a means toward rebirth of individual physical consciousness while abandoning the romantic iconography that had previously elevated the sea-going protagonist to the status of mythic hero or religious martyr. |
