How do the situation and the outcome of Stephen Crane's short story "The Open Boat" exemplify "naturalism"?

“Naturalism” in literature is often associated with the
following traits, many of which are exemplified in Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open
Boat”:

• an emphasis on a view of nature,
  including human nature, that is realistic, unromantic, and unsentimental.  Certainly
  Crane’s story, which focuses on a desperate struggle by shipwrecked men to survive in
  the dangerous ocean, is naturalistic in this sense.


• an
  emphasis on a universe in which God can seem absent or distant. God in the Christian
  sense – a compassionate, loving, merciful, fatherly deity – is never mentioned in
  Crane’s story.  This is especially ironic, since one might have expected at least one of
  the men to call for help from this God.  Instead, the only “gods” mentioned (repeatedly)
  are the “the seven mad gods who rule the
  sea.”


• naturalistic fiction often emphasizes some kind of
  struggle to survive, and certainly this is true in Crane’s
  story.


• naturalistic fiction can seem dark and depressing,
  at least to anyone who looks to fiction to be uplifting and cheerful. Certainly Crane’s
  story is not brimming with optimism or joy.


• naturalistic
  fiction often emphasizes challenges, suffering, pain, and death, and certainly these
  traits can be found in Crane’s tale.


• the style of
  naturalistic fiction is often dry, understated, unexciting, even a bit drab.
  Naturalistic style tends to focus on facts rather than stirring (or otherwise strong)
  emotions. Consider this sentence, for instance, from “The Open
  Boat”:

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The correspondent, pulling at the other oar,
watched the waves andwondered why he was
there.

Not all the phrasing
in “The Open Boat,” of course, is as plain and unadorned as the one just quoted. 
Consider, for instance, the final sentence of the
story:

When it
came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the
sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then
be interpreters.

Still, one
is far more likely to find sentences like this one in Melville’s
Moby-Dick than in Crane’s “The Open Boat.”