Stephen Crane’s 1898 short story “The Open Boat,” based loosely on the author’s own shipwreck experience, prefigures much of what would become standard in modernist literature: distrust, confusion, and a desperate exploration of art’s potential for humanity. The story represents a twofold act of self-preservation for Crane, who not only creates a safe zone where, through identification with his fictitious persona, he relives his own shipwreck experience from a secure distance, but also, in withholding identification, leaves readers open to what Silvan Tomkins calls “empathic shame,” a communal affect that deems readers “interpreters” of the limits of individualism within a healthy democracy.