A Psychological Shipwreck

"A Psychological Shipwreck" as published in Can Such Things Be? in 1893

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A Psychological Shipwreck

"A Psychological Shipwreck" is a short story written by Ambrose Bierce and published by The Argonaut under the title "My Shipwreck" on May 24, 1879.^[1] It was included in the 1893 collection Can Such Things Be?

Plot summary

In Liverpool, William Jarrett (the first-person narrator) boards the Morrow, a sailing ship for New York, with few other companions besides a woman, Miss Janette Harford. They become friendly and connect in a deep way that William assures the reader is not love. However, when he speaks of this feeling to Jannette, she takes up a strange look towards him and continues to look at him before closing her eyes. She appears to have fallen asleep. William looks at the book she is reading on her lap and where her index finger fell. It fell on a passage from Denneker's Meditations about souls meeting and knowing one another from beyond the body. Soon a storm sets in and creates havoc. The ship begins to sink and after Janette is ripped away from William, he passes out.

The narrator awakes in a berth on the City of Prague, a steamship that left at the same time as the Morrow and Jarrett had been originally invited to go aboard with his friend Gordon Doyle. The latter stares at him now trying to deduce what is going on. As William slowly learns, he has been on the City of Prague since she set sail from Liverpool. He also learns that Janette is Gordon's fiancée who was sent on the Morrow so that Doyle could settle things in New York before her arrival. William also notices the book that Doyle is reading which is Denneker's Meditations with a special passage marked, apparently a second copy that Janette had given him. When Gordon and Jarrett arrive in New York, they look for the Morrow to arrive, but it never appears.

References

↑ http://www.ambrosebierce.org/shipwreck.htm

Works by Ambrose Bierce

Books	Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) The Devil's Dictionary (1906) A Vision of Doom (1980)

Short stories	"A Psychological Shipwreck" (1879) "Killed at Resaca" (1887) "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1887) "One of the Missing" (1888) "A Tough Tussle" (1888) "An Unfinished Race" (1888) "One of Twins" (1888) "A Horseman in the Sky" (1889) "The Spook House" (1889) "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" (1890) "The Man and the Snake" (1890) "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) "The Realm of the Unreal" (1890) "The Boarded Window" (1891) "The Secret of Macarger's Gulch" (1891) "The Death of Halpin Frayser" (1891) "The Damned Thing" (1893) "The Eyes of the Panther" (1897) "Moxon's Master" (1899) "The Moonlit Road" (1907) "Beyond the Wall" (1907)

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