"Man Overboard" by Sir Winston Churchill: A Commentary

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 Deceptively simple, Sir Winston Churchill's 1899 short story “Man Overboard: An Episode of the Red Sea” is a true work of art. The story's technique is superb, highlighting the human condition through juxtapositions of pairs of contrasting extremes—comfort and misery, safety and danger, camaraderie and loneliness, accommodation and abandonment, security and vulnerability, hope and despair, joy and horror, civilization and nature, music and silence, light and darkness, ignorance and revelation—as a means of evoking the plight of humans as beings whose existence straddles two worlds, the natural and the spiritual, and who are as much out of water, as it were, in one as in the other.

The story opens in media res, presenting readers with an anonymous passenger aboard a mail steamer that is making its way through the Red Sea. After stepping outside the hot confines of the steamer's companion-house, where a concert is underway, the protagonist, listening to a raucous song, “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys,” seems in good spirits as he remembers “the brilliant and busy streets” he used to frequent years ago, perhaps in his younger, carefree days. His reverie is broken when the rail against which he leans, not having been tightly fastened to the ship, breaks, sending him plummeting into the sea.

A moment before, all was well; all was right with the world. He was safe, among the ship's passengers and crew, aboard a steamer which might be taken as a symbol of the human civilization of which the man overboard is a member. Civilization, as represented by the steamer, however, is not an infallible hedge against nature. Swept overboard, swept away from civilization and humanity, on his own in the sea, the nameless protagonist is alone, helpless, and vulnerable. 

 

One wants to escape company, to be alone, at times, but not for long. A smoke break is one thing; being alone in the sea, in the darkness, far from human society is quite another. “The Rowdy Dowdy Boys” brought fond memories to the protagonist's mind, while he was safe aboard the steamer, but the exploits of the boys of the song are no help to him now. Music, an artifact of civilized life, is replaced by the silence of the sea, in which only the man's sobs are now to be heard as he, and he alone, laments his fate. The song, which was “all the rage at all the music halls” only a few years ago, is meaningless now, its strains nothing more than an ironic and dispiriting reminder of the situation in which the man overboard now finds himself.

Irony is repeated throughout the story, at first stressing the difference between civilization, as it is encapsulated by the steamer, and nature, as it is represented by the sea. Aboard the steamer, there is an “accommodation-ladder”; there is a “companion-house”; there is a “concert”; there is a gathering of fellow “passengers”; such accommodations are not offered by the sea. In the ocean, there is only darkness, silence, and loneliness. The progress of the steamer highlights the gulf between civilization and nature, as the vessel puts more and more distance between itself and the man overboard. The steamer becomes less and less distinct and less and less significant, as the sea becomes the protagonist's sole and entire world—an alien and inhospitable world that exhausts him, causes him to despair, and leaves him, literally, without a prayer.

 

Left to his own devices, the man overboard soon realizes that he is no match for nature. The camaraderie of his fellow men is replaced by the indifference of nature. As the ship “dwindles” in the distance, its light is all but extinguished, and the protagonist is left alone in the darkness of the immense sea, a predicament in which neither shouting, swimming, praying, nor cursing avails anything. He is—and understands that he has been—“abandoned”; that he is alone; that he cannot survive; that he is helpless. He can do nothing, he realizes, and the discovery makes his brain reel. There is but one thing he can do: appeal to a power beyond nature, its Creator, for assistance, for salvation. He prays, but his words are clumsy and “incoherent,” sounds of madness.

Ironically, the man overboard feels “joy and hope,” and gratitude fills his heart, as he thinks the appearance of a faint light upon the dark surface of the sea may be the steamer returning for him. However, as the light withdraws, becoming increasingly smaller, almost as if it taunts him, he realizes that the ship is not returning, that he is alone, and “despair succeeds hope,” as he grapples with the significance of the tiny pinprick of light's vanishing in the distance and the darkness of the sea. Where, in desperation, he has prayed, he now, desperate again, this time, curses, but his curses avail him no more than had his prayers. He is alone; he is abandoned. Either God has not heard his prayer or has chosen not to answer the man's petition.

He finds that he cannot summon the will even to drown himself. His only recourse is to offer another prayer, and he begs, “O God! Let me die.” Ironically, he spies the fin of a shark fifty yards from him, and, as it approaches him, the narrator concludes, “His last appeal had been heard.”

The end of the story is terrifying for either of two reasons. It may convey the horror of living, as a human being, in a world that is indifferent by nature to one's existence. Alternatively, it may suggest that, if God exists, if He hears prayers, He may answer them, if at all, in a way that is, from a human viewpoint, utterly alien to such concepts as compassion, mercy, and love. In such a case, not only is the source of nature, of life itself, unconcerned about His creation, but He is also capricious. He might fefuse to answer a prayer for death that is uttered in despair, or He might elect to respond to a plea for deliverance from the anguish of hopelessness and absurdity in a way that brings terrible and horrific violence upon the distraught petitioner.

In the final analysis, Churchill's use of irony ends in a sense of astonishment that can be captured, if at all, only by a sentiment such as that of Moby Dick's Queequeg, who declares “de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” Short though it is, “Man Overboard” is more than the hour's amusement Churchill described it as being when he shared the tale with General Ian Hamilton. Churchill's tale ranks with Stephen Crane's fabulous short story “The Open Boat” in its portrait of existential angst—and all in a space of 1,100 words or so.

 

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Commentary

The poem expresses the fleeting nature of fame and its ultimate vanity, or futility. It begins with the speaker of the poem recounting his meeting a “traveler from an antique land.” The “antique land” is Egypt, a place steeped in ancient history, tradition, and lore. According to this traveler, “two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert,” not far from a “a shattered visage” that lies “half sunk” in the sand. Obviously, this had once been a huge statue of a man, whose figure had been carved to stand for all time.

Apparently, the figure was one of authority, for the haughty, contemptuous face that is now half buried in the desert sand wears a “frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” The face is lifelike in the sense that it conveys its real-life counterpart’s arrogant disdain: showing “that its sculptor well those passions read,” passions which “survive” in the features of the stone visage that the artist had “stamped” centuries ago, “on these lifeless things.” Ironically, the statue that was to memorialize the proud ruler has come to ruin in the desert wasteland, a victim of centuries of erosion. It is broken, partly missing, and to some extent buried. It has not stood the test of time very well. Time has not been kind to the memory of the harsh ruler. His memorial has not immortalized him.

On the pedestal, the haughty ruler has left a final address to the world. His last words identify him as “Ozymandias, king of kings,” commanding the mighty who should see his statue to consider his accomplishments and “despair” at ever hoping to rival his own mighty works. These final words, however, are empty and vain. They are hollow and seem to mock the broken, decapitated statue that has long since become nothing more than “a mighty wreck”:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Fame is as uncertain as life itself. In pagan societies, even far later than those of the vanished Egypt of centuries ago, people aspired to immortality by being remembered and honored by succeeding generations. We see this impulse as late as the Anglo-Saxon period, in which the hero Beowulf hopes to attain an immortality similar to Ozymandias’ by virtue of his having performed great deeds of courage. Ozymandias, it seems, was more than a mere warrior chieftain. He was “king of kings” who had accomplished peerless deeds. His person had been commemorated with a gigantic statue of stone. Nevertheless, his hopes were all in vain. The sole reminder of his long-ago existence is a crumbling “wreck,” which has been, as it were, not only dismembered and decapitated by the wind and the sand, but also half buried in the lonely desert, “boundless and bare,” that stretches away from the ruined monument on every hand.

If this king’s life has been forgotten, certainly those of ordinary men and women will not be remembered. Centuries after one’s death, what shall it mean that a man or a woman ever lived at all? The poem seems to suggest a pessimistic answer, ending not only as a cautionary tale concerning the vanity of human pride and the futility of memorials as a means of attaining immortality, but also a declaration that human existence is, when all is said and done, what the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre characterized as “absurd.” We live and we die, and centuries later, it is as if we never existed, no matter how great our accomplishments might have been during our lifetimes.

Ozymandias, we should note, is the pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1212 B. C. His shattered granite statue lies at the site of the Ramesseum, his temple, at Gurna, Egypt, and the “colossal wreck” of his shattered statue has been photographed. The ancient Greeks, who derived “Ozymandias” from one of Ramesses’ many titles, gave him the name “Ozymandias.”

The Incomplete Completist

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Cat Pajamas's “Introduction: Alive and Kicking and Writing,” Ray Bradbury offers a clue to the meaning of his short story “The Completist.”

First, he recounts the story's inspiration. He and his wife Maggie, he says, met a “book collector and library founder” during “a voyage across the Atlantic” (xv).

After listening for to him hours, the Bradburys learned of the shocking incident with which Bradbury concludes his story (xv). The story, he adds, wasn't written for twenty years, when Maggie's death prompted him to write it (xv).

The narrative is based upon his recognition that the gentleman he and Maggie had met on their voyage represents a metaphor of sorts (xv), and this connection between the metaphorical significance of a particular person offers us a clue as to how Bradbury, the writer, wrote, or sometimes wrote.

If something is a metaphor, it shares certain characteristics with something else, the tenor, that is not otherwise like it. In doing so, the metaphor conveys a likeness between certain aspects of the otherwise different things.

Although there is no equivalency between the metaphor and the tenor, it is sometimes helpful to pretend that there is, so that a metaphor-tenor relationship may be written, as Bette Midler declares in her song “The Rose”:

Love = river

Love = razor

Love = hunger

Love = flower

She also declares how the metaphor and the tenor are alike: as a “river,” love “drowns the tender reed”; as a “razor,” love “leaves your soul to bleed”; as “hunger,” love is “an endless aching need”; and, as a “flower,” love is the product of a unique seed—the “you,” or listener, to whom Midler sings.

For Bradbury, as a metaphor, the book collector and library founder, the “Completist,” seems to personify culture.

Concerning the traveler's fictional counterpart, the story's narrator informs the reader, “At no time did he allow us to speak.” The Completist tells the couple that he travels the world, “collecting books, building libraries, and entertaining his soul (221-222).” He is the very embodiment of art and culture, collecting and distributing it, even as he himself enjoys it (222). Funded by his law firm, he has just “spent time in Paris, Rome, London, and Moscow and had shipped home tens of thousands of rare volumes” (222). Moreover, the Completist has constructed a vast repository of medical texts, novels, and books devoted to art, history, philosophy, and world travel (222-223).

In doing so, it seems that the lawyer seeks to reinvent the world as he would have it to be, a place of culture, education, and entertainment; he tells his listeners that Sir John Soane, “the great English architect” did something similar, reconstructing “all of London in his mind and in the drawings made according to his specifications” (222-223).

The Completist, having discovered some of Soane's “library dreams,” used them as the bases to build his own “university” on more than “a hundred acres” of his own property, where physicians, surgeons, and academics from around the world congregate every weekend.

His estate's “multitudinous centers of learning” allow its visitors to explore the cultural “treasures” of the world, as they stroll its meadows, amid “grand lanterns of education” and “read in an environment that [is] conducive to vast learning” (223-224).

As Bradbury warns in his book's introduction, the story ends with a shocking incident. The Completist, a man of culture, education, and refinement, a world traveler who has delved deeply into the world's cultural “treasures,” seeks to know “only one last thing”: “Why did my thirty-five-year-old son kill his wife, destroy his daughter, and hang himself?”

The couple (stand-ins, perhaps, for Bradbury's readers) is at a loss for words, not that it matters; the Completist does not wait for a response, nor does he appear to expect one. The horrific fates of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter seem to represent the dilemma known to philosophers as the problem of evil, except, in Bradbury's story, it has more of a secular, than a religious, dimension. 
(In philosophy, the problem of evil is a counterargument to the assertion that the universe is ruled by a God who is both loving and just, and asks how the fact of the existence of evil be reconciled with belief in the existence of a God who is both loving and just.)

The Completist seems to seek his answer in culture and education, in medicine, literature, art, history, philosophy, and world travel, but despite his many superb and expensive “collections,” he still has no answer to the question of why his son killed his wife and destroyed his daughter before taking his own life. It is a mystery as unanswerable as it is consuming, and no amount of cultural “treasures” can compensate for these losses, both of family and of purpose.

Perhaps this is why he calls himself “The Completist.” The term refers to not to a connoisseur of art, but instead, to “an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something.” Perhaps the story's Completist seeks to fill a void that cannot be filled. By filling himself and his estate and as many others as he can with culture and education, he may suggest that, if not now, if not today, then at some time in the future, the void within himself may be filled, that his thirst for knowledge in general and of one thing in particular may be quenched.

Or perhaps he collects the riches of culture simply to pass the time, merely to have something to do that others believe is significant, even if he himself does not. Until one's own demise, it is best to keep busy, he may think; it is best to pretend to believe that, despite unanswerable questions and horrific events, there is a reason to live and a purpose to perseverance.

It is also possible, of course, that the Completist actually does believe that, despite the absurdity of existence, there is, indeed, still a reason to live. Bradbury's statement, in his introduction, suggests that the story may be interpreted in this manner. Following Maggie's illness and death, he says, “for the first time in seventy years, my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.” As time went by, he started to question whether he'd “ever write again.” Then, he thought of “The Completist gentleman,” and he found himself eager to write the story of the metaphor with which, for two decades, he'd done “nothing.”

Like other writers, Bradbury writes about his own experiences, but he seems , frequently, to do so by introducing the intermediary of a metaphor. He says what he says by speaking about something else that is similar in some respects but different otherwise. The Completist is a metaphor for the absurdity of existence, it seems, but also a metaphor for the angst that Bradbury felt when the light of his life, his Maggie, was extinguished. For Bradbury, the “university” that the Completist built is the author's return to writing fiction, his stories the works of art and other cultural artifacts that make up the author's own collections, including the stories collected in The Cat's Pajamas.

Bradbury's writing fills, or attempts to fill, the great abyss within him that the death of his muse, his wife, his Maggie, created. Like the Completist, he offers it to the world, for the entertainment and edification of those who desire or need diversion and enlightenment.

The Value of Literature

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Fiction begins with empathy, as a writer imagines what it would be like to be another individual. He or she puts him- or herself into another person’s shoes, except that, of course, the person is a literary character, rather than a flesh-and-blood man, woman, or child, whom the writer creates. The process works in reverse, too--or is claimed to do so: readers, identifying with literary characters, experience and understand life from these figures’ points of view. For this reason, literature is said to broaden and to deepen human experience.

Since the behavior of fictional characters models that of actual human beings, fiction provides the potential for making ethical decisions and statements about human behavior in general; it allows readers to assess, evaluate, and judge whether a character’s conduct is moral and beneficial or immoral and disadvantageous to him or her and to others, including society in general. Indeed, fiction can be--or has been, at least--a means of transmitting values to present and future generations and societies, as, for example, Beowulf did and as the Bible continues to do for many.

In previous posts, we have considered the types of values that horror fiction conveys. It shows what writers consider to be wrong, or evil, and it demonstrates, through the behavior of the protagonist, how such wickedness can be resisted or overcome, indicating, in the process, that terrible and horrific experiences, including the loss of life and limb, can be endured and that the truly important things in life have nothing to do with such petty pursuits as power, fame, and fortune.

Can the assertions that literature makes--the themes of stories--be proven to be true or false, as a scientist, for example, can demonstrate the truth of the theory that some microorganisms cause disease or that the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen molecules results in the substance we call “water”? No. Are such claims without value, then?

Sigmund Freud

Until relatively recently, Sigmund Freud’s theory of human personality and behavior, psychoanalysis, was not only the predominant school of thought in this domain, but it was the domain, or, to use a different metaphor, it was the only game in town. Carl Jung’s psychology, like that of Alfred Adler’s, Erik Ericson’s, Ernest Jones’, Karen Horney’s, Jacques Lacan’s, Otto Rank’s, Erich Fromm’s, and others in the fold, were mere variations of Freud’s thought. Psychoanalysis was psychology.

Karl Popper

It was not until Karl Popper and other critics asked Freud, as it were, to set his theory’s superego, ego, and id upon the examination table, the better to see and feel, taste and touch, smell and measure them, that psychoanalysis lost its devotees. It was considered unscientific because it consisted of ideas which, by definition, cannot be measured or quantified and, therefore, cannot be empirically verified. In other words, it was a myth, not a science.

Besides the triune composition of personality that Freud posited, other of his ideas were also found to be unscientific and suspect, such as his theory of psychosexual development as being comprised of discreet stages (oral, anal, Oedipal, and genital) and his view of the existence of an “unconscious mind.” His much-vaunted “talking cure” and his attributing all behavioral disorders to unresolved sexual problems related to childhood also came under serious attack, chiefly by feminists, who regard Freudian thought and, in particular, his references to “penis envy” and to women as wannabe men, as highly sexist and offensive. Once the end-all and the be-all of psychology, psychoanalysis took on the appearance of being little more than a modern version of ancient shamanism, with its practitioners considered more witchdoctors than scientists.

How is this related to the value of literature? The themes that literature expresses are of the same type as those which psychoanalysis makes--that is, they are speculative, not scientific; they cannot be quantified or verified. They cannot be scientifically proven or disproved. If, therefore, psychoanalysis is without value, literature would also seem to be without value, for the same reasons.

Martin Heidegger

Those who believe that literature, including, for example, philosophical and religious texts, does have some kind of value have had to reevaluate the matter. Many, in doing so, adopt a position akin to that of the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argues that literature is not about the objective, measurable world of nature, but is, rather, about the inner man or woman.

In short, literary texts are about human experience, as it is understood consciously, by the person him- or herself, and, since people do not exist in a vacuum, but are products of their cultures and societies, literature also provides insights into the nature of such traditions and social groups. Moreover, literature is a means by which authors and readers may share such experiences and it is, as such, a sort of glue that helps to cement individuals and societies together and to suggest personal and social meanings for them that science, by nature, cannot suggest.

Since most other disciplines, scientific and otherwise, impinge upon literature (or literature impinges upon them), it creates a complex network of interrelated ideas which enriches the discussion of the artistic, moral, social, legal, philosophical, political, religious, and theological questions that literature often raises. Although many of these other domains are as unscientific as literature itself, they have value for the same reason that literature does: they unite human beings through shared experience. Men and women are more than natural objects among a world of other things. They are conscious. They think and feel, believe and desire, hope and strive. Science’s importance, notwithstanding, science has little to do with any of these subjective expressions and functions of the human soul.

Soren Kierkegaard

Science may tell us what is, but it cannot tell us what should be, any more than it can tell us how what is feels or how we should think or feel about reality. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that, although, in principle, through science, the universe is known, he himself is left over, as “an unscientific postscript.” The domain of philosophy, religion, and literature in general, including horror fiction, is that of the “leftover” self, and these domains are about sharing the self with the other selves of the world. As long as people believe that they themselves and others have value and that their experience matters, literature and its themes will continue to have value as well.

Besides, literature can be pretty entertaining.