Understanding the Essay and Why It Still Comes Up in Classes
Roger Rosenblatt's "The Man In The Water" appeared in Time magazine in 1983. It won a National Magazine Award. The basic subject is straightforward: a man in the Potomac River in January, holding onto a steel pipe after a plane crash, keeping six other people alive until they were rescued. He died. Rosenblatt writes about what that means, and why people care about it. I have assigned this essay in composition courses for years. Students usually come to it with one of two assumptions, and both are wrong. They assume it is primarily a war story about heroism, or they assume it is a simple celebration of altruism. It is neither. The essay is really about the tension between our instinct to dismiss heroic behavior as sentimental and our inability to actually dismiss it when confronted with a real example.
The Man In The Water By Roger Rosenblatt
The historical context matters here. The incident involved American Flight 370, which crashed into the Potomac on January 13, 1982. The man Rosenblatt focuses on was later identified as Dale Robinson. The others who survived were pulled from the water. Robinson did not survive. Rosenblatt uses the details of that event as a starting point, not the destination. One thing that trips people up is the narrative structure. The essay does not follow a chronological retelling of the crash. Rosenblatt moves between the facts of what happened and a broader meditation on why society has become uncomfortable with the word "hero." That second thread is the essay's actual engine. If you read it only for the story, you miss most of what he is doing. When I grade papers on this, the most common mistake is students treating Rosenblatt's skepticism about heroism as his final position. It is not. He raises the skepticism, lets it sit for a while, then undercuts it with the evidence of Robinson's actions. The essay is structured as a kind of argument with itself. You can see him pushing against the conventional wisdom that altruism is rare or naive, then stepping back and letting the facts push harder.
Another detail people tend to gloss over: Rosenblatt does not claim to know Robinson's motives. He does not construct a psychology of the dead man. He explicitly avoids that. The essay's restraint in that area is one of its strongest technical moves. He states the limits of what can be known and writes anyway. That honesty is worth noticing if you are trying to analyze his method. I encountered a specific problem when preparing a discussion guide for this essay a few years back. Students kept conflating the actual event with Rosenblatt's interpretation of it. They would cite sentences from the essay as if they were reporting raw facts rather than authorial reflection. The workaround was having them separate every claim into two columns: what the news reports established versus what Rosenblatt was arguing. It took about ten minutes of annotation and cleared up the confusion almost entirely. The essay also touches on a concept that comes up again in Rosenblatt's later work: the difference between moral philosophy and moral behavior. People can discuss virtue ethics for hours and still be unable to recognize it when it walks out of the river. That gap between theory and practice is where the essay does its heaviest lifting, even though it never uses academic terminology to describe it.
Get the Full Details
If you are looking at this for a class, the primary text is available through Time's archive. Rosenblatt's collected essays and appearances on public radio around 1983 and 1984 provide useful context for how the piece was received. The immediate response was largely positive, though some reviewers found the meditation on heroism overstated. That disagreement is still worth reading about, because it tells you something about the cultural moment the essay emerged from.
