The two characters that stand out as being victim of the shaping forces of naturalisms is Paul in Cather’s “Paul’s Case” and the Correspondent in Crane’s “The Open Boat”. In one character it is naturalistic determinate Environment, and the other environment and hereditary.
In Crane’s “The Open Boat” the correspondent and other kin, representing different characters within society, are at the mercy of the relentless sea. The sea, which in the story represents life, besides being beyond man’s sphere of influence, is an unpredictable and merciless environment as Crane vividly describes “these waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall”. The Correspondent, throughout his ordeal at sea, tries to reason and make sense of the …show more content…
The rest was a mere matter of opportunity.”
(Cather, 170). Paul is driven out of despair to live his dream, even if only for a short while. His world is so dark, and desire to fit into the environment he feels he belongs in, that he carries out foolish plans of stealing money and running away to the Waldorf Astoria in New York. His elation at finally being a part of the world he feels he belongs to is that “He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect”. His new surroundings and feelings of being at ease allows himself to “realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—behind him, or before, or on either side. There had