The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (3 page)

Perosa adds that such verbs as “
to see, perceive, look, observe, gaze, witness, watch, stare, peer, cast eyes, discover
, etc., appear on practically every page, indeed, no less than 350 times in this fairly short novel.”
¹⁶
Or consider this passage in chapter V: “Once he saw a tiny battery go dashing along the line of the horizon. The tiny riders were beating the tiny horses.” Obviously, Fleming perceives the battery at a far distance; he does not
literally
watch a miniature battery. As James Nagel observes, “This scene represents the simplest form of unreliability in Impressionism in that it is the projection of raw, apprehensive data from the mind of a character.”
¹⁷
With good reason, Joseph Conrad called Crane “
the
impressionist” of his age;
¹⁸
Ørm Øverland has suggested that Crane's use of color “on many points bears close resemblance to the technique of the impressionist painters”;
¹⁹
and Eric Solomon has suggested that
Red Badge
“should be termed an impressionistic-naturalistic novel” or vice versa.
²⁰

In battle, Fleming perceives an absurd world without any meaning or explanations save for those he invents. According to Thomas L. Kent, “Henry understands neither the behavior of his commanders nor his situation; in his perplexity, he finds the meaning of his experience incomprehensible.”
²¹
From the second sentence of the novel, the soldiers feed on scuttlebutt and gossip, not information, as if to illustrate the adage that in war the first casualty is truth. As late as chapter XVI the riflemen in the trenches hear rumors “of hesitation and uncertainty on the part of those high in place and responsibility.” In chapter III, even before his first taste of combat, Fleming distances his despair at two removes: “
Once he thought he had concluded
that it would be better to get killed directly and end his troubles” (italics added). He continually rationalizes his behavior, as in chapter VI: “He felt that he was a fine fellow.” To the extent that values exist, moreover, they are experiential, not transcendental, such as the “subtle battle brotherhood” among the soldiers or the “mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death.” Confronted by evidence of his utter insignificance in a non-teleological universe, he adopts new illusions rather than confront the truth about his life.

Nor does it seem he ever learns to temper his knee-jerk reaction to crisis. In the sequel to Crane's novel, the short story “The Veteran” (1896), set thirty years after the war, Fleming responds to an emergency like an old fire horse put out to pasture. Discharged from the army an “orderly sergeant,” ironically enough, “old Fleming” has become a prosperous farmer with an aged wife, several sons, and at least one grandson. When his barn catches fire, he responds with hardly a word to save his cows and one of his hired men. But in the excitement he has forgotten the colts at the back of the barn. When he foolishly rushes back to save “the poor little things,” as he “absent-mindedly” calls them, the roof collapses. Reacting to danger unthinkingly as in the novel, old Fleming fails to understand that he faces “sure death” or virtual “suicide” (as his neighbors realize) if he tries to rescue his colts. Like the novel, this brief sequel challenges conventional notions of courage. Its final paragraph, with its paean to “the old man's mighty spirit, released from its body” that “swelled like the genie of fable,” may be read as an ironic tribute. Fleming's bravery may be no more real than an imaginary elf.

 

Ever the iconoclast, Crane demythologized the Old West in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898) and “The Blue Hotel” (1898) just as he debunked the nobility of war in
The Red Badge of Courage
and his bitterly ironic poem “Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind” (1896). He seems to have followed the lead of Mark Twain's
Roughing It
(1871) in ridiculing the legendary West, though he insisted he did “not care” for Twain's long works: “Four hundred pages of humor is a little bit too much for me.”
²²
In the former story, Crane in effect parodied the climactic gunfight in
The Virginian
(1902) four years before Owen Wister published his novel. The hero Jack Potter, town marshal of Yellow Sky, returns to the west Texas town with his new bride, the avatar or agent of eastern civilization, only to confront the gunslinger Scratchy Wilson, the “last one of the old gang that used to hang out along the river,” as he steps off the train. Whereas the Virginian must duel and kill the villain Trampas against the wishes of his betrothed, Potter confounds Wilson in his drunken reverie by explaining that he is unarmed and recently married, whereupon Wilson anticlimactically shuffles away, leaving “funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.” This final image, as many critics have observed, connotes an hourglass, suggesting that with the marshal's marriage the gunslinger belongs to an old order whose time has passed. Potter's bride is not the first bride in the town; the narrator reports that “people in Yellow Sky married as it pleased them.” For the marshal to take a wife, however, means that he has brought a modicum of order and security to the frontier and he is in little danger of dying young at the hands of outlaws. Even though she is the title character, his bride remains unnamed because her identity is less important than the fact of her marriage and arrival in the town.

Similarly, in the latter story Crane parodied dime novel westerns with their stock characters and sensational plots. Set in a symbolic world of blind chance, “The Blue Hotel” features a stereotypical Swede who is stupid, innocent, and easily intoxicated. (“The Veteran” also depicts a Swedish hired hand who drives a buggy into town “to get drunk.”) Registering at a hotel in Fort Romper, Nebraska, with its connotations of children at play, the Swede believes he has strayed into the Wild West. Conditioned by his reading of dime novels much as Henry Fleming has been influenced by Homer's
Iliad,
he assumes that “many men have been killed” in the parlor of the hotel and he expects “to be killed before I can leave this house!” The hosteler Scully (= skull-y), a town booster, tries to reassure him that Fort Romper is booming, and, with its plans for a line of electric street cars, a rail spur from a neighboring city, four churches, a brick school, and a factory, is destined to become a “met-tro-
pol
-is.” Even the dim-witted cowboy Bill, a caricature of the cowboy of western legend, realizes that “This is Nebrasker,” not a distant western town. When the Swede, drunk on Scully's whiskey, accuses Scully's degenerate son Johnnie of cheating at cards, however, the game morphs into a fistfight in the blizzard outside the hotel. That is, as James Ellis explains, the story shifts “from the microcosmic card game of High-Five in which the players play their own cards to the macrocosmic game of chance in which the players themselves become cards played upon by Fate.”
²³
After he whips Johnnie, the Swede quits the hotel for a nearby saloon, enduring en route the vicissitudes of weather. “We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity,” Crane writes,

Crane never wrote a more sardonic sentence. Entering the saloon, the Swede picks a fight with a professional gambler, a decadent version of the chivalrous gamblers John Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin in Bret Harte's fiction, who stabs and kills him. The cash machine on the bar offers a heavy-handed conclusion to the story: “This registers the amount of your purchase.” It seems that the Swede's death has been foreordained.

Or is it? Characteristically, Crane offers a “lady or the tiger” conclusion to the tale, one of them rigidly deterministic, the other an affirmation of human agency. In the final chapter, the cowboy and the journalist Mr. Blanc, a reporter (and Crane persona) but not a participant in events, cross paths several months later. Blanc explains that Johnnie was indeed cheating at cards, and so in failing to intervene in the fistfight all of the principal characters “have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.” (The stupid cowboy utters the last words in the story in reply: “Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?”) In this alternative ending, Crane explains the Swede's death according to the doctrine of complicity of his mentor Howells. In his novel
The Minister's Charge
(1887), Howells has a character declare that “No man . . . sinned or suffered to himself alone.”
²⁴
Either of these alternative conclusions works, yet they are philosophically incompatible. In effect, by suggesting that either interpretation is possible, Crane illustrates the limitations of any theory of fiction that presumes to explain all of the mysteries of human behavior. Crane once wrote that Howells “developed all alone a little creed of art which I thought was a good one. Later I discovered that my creed was identical with the one of Howells and Garland.”
²⁵
He overstated his affinity with “the Dean of American Letters,” however. As he matured as a writer, he became increasingly skeptical about all creeds and ideologies.

Much as Crane demythologized the West in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” his sketch “A Self-Made Man” (1899) inaugurated a minor tradition of satirical treatments of the Horatio Alger success story that would include F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Vegetable, or From President to Postman
(1923), Nathanael West's
A Cool Million
(1934), and William Gaddis's
JR.
(1975). Crane was probably familiar with Alger's work: during the 1890s both lived in New York and for a time they even shared a common publisher, Frank Leslie. For the record, moreover, Crane's sketch likely parodied a specific Alger novel,
Tom Tracy, or the Trials of a New York Newsboy
(1887). Certainly the structure of Crane's sketch inverts the Alger formula: the ironic hero Tom, a ne'er-do-well who exhibits neither luck, pluck, nor a single virtue, meets his ironic patron, an illiterate old man who made a fortune selling worthless land in the West. Together they put the screws on the old man's snobbish son, who has been robbing him. The snob, who protests he was “only borrowin' ” the money, makes restitution to the old man, who moves into the same boarding house as the hero. Tom gets the reputation, utterly undeserved, of one who “carved his way to fortune with no help but his undaunted pluck, his tireless energy, and his sterling integrity.” Just as Alger's typical hero adopts his Christian name as a badge of his respectability by the end of the novel, moreover, Tom becomes Thomas G. Somebody in the final paragraphs of Crane's sketch. Much as nineteenth-century reviewers often criticized Alger's juvenile stories for their improbability and emphasis on luck, Crane satirized Alger simply by telescoping formulaic events and exaggerating the glaring defects in his fiction.

 

In “The Open Boat,” based upon Crane's own ordeal after the sinking of the
Commodore
off the Florida coast in 1897, four characters adrift in a lifeboat are in danger of drowning. The story is nearly flawless in its naturalism, its depiction of their struggle for existence against the forces of an indifferent if not hostile Nature. As in
The Red Badge of Courage,
values exist only insofar as they are willed or created by the characters. This company of unpretentious men—a cook, a correspondent, the captain, and the oiler—willingly discharge their duties, particularly by taking turns at rowing the boat, and they share cigars and water. The correspondent—another Crane persona—though “taught to be cynical of men” realized it “was the best experience of his life.”

Like the soldiers in
The Red Badge of Courage,
the four men cooperate in order to increase their chances of mutual survival in the face of a common predicament. “The obligation of the man at the oars was to keep the boat headed so that the tilt of the rollers would not capsize her.” “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas.” They were “friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common.” Under the circumstances, the “ethics of their condition” was “decidedly against any open suggestion of hopelessness. So they were silent.” To increase their “common safety,” to maximize their chances at survival, each of the men must practice the power of positive thinking. At the edge of annihilation, moreover, the “distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear” and the correspondent “understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea.” In context, the “distinction between right and wrong” to a person at risk of dying is nothing more than a code of polite conduct.

The first sentence of the tale—“None of them knew the color of the sky”—underscores the epistemological uncertainties of the men. They know neither exactly where they are nor the exact nature of the threats they face between the sharks and the elements. Their refrain (“funny they don't see us”) and their disjointed conversation in section IV epitomize the vagaries and incomprehensibility of their world. Their attempts to signal people on shore consist of a series of tragic-comical misunderstandings as they mistake a beachcomber playfully waving his arms for a rescuer, for example, and a tourist bus for a boat they expect to be launched from a lifeguard station. This part of the story, with its non-referential dialogue, reads like a modern absurdist drama. Much as Fleming senses his unimportance in battle in
The Red Badge of Courage,
the men in “The Open Boat” confront an indifferent universe, best represented by the “high cold star on a winter's night” that afflicts the correspondent with a cosmic chill and the abandoned wind tower that stands “with its back to the plight of the ants.” Nature “did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.” Only in its final sentence, with three of the men safe ashore, does the story open the possibility of genuine communication: “they felt that they then could be interpreters.”