Stephen Crane's ''The Open Boat'' is generally acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of the modern short story. The question of the story's excellence has never been debated; the only questions have been the proper means of defining the story's modernity and of accounting for what appear to be certain awkwardnesses of style, tone, and point of view. ''The Open Boat'' has been hailed as an example of naturalistic fiction at its best until recent …showed first 75 words of 2422 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2422 total…with knowing, and perhaps the final irony is in the community of shared experience which these final lines seem to suggest, for however communal the interpretation of the ''great sea's voice,'' nothing in the story suggests that any one of the three men remaining can conceptualize the death of the oiler without, perhaps, falsely transfiguring him into a figure like the soldier of the Legion, whose death was ''an actuality--stern, mournful, and fine.''