The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (4 page)

But, in a final irony, only three of the four men reach shore safely. As they maneuver the boat toward shore and it capsizes in the surf, the “oiler was ahead in the race” as the men swim to the beach. That is, he is among the “fittest” who ought to survive according to the Darwinian paradigm. Crane's own Darwinian beliefs are nowhere more evident than in his poem “The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers” (1899), a parable in which those who gather “great heaps—/ Having opportunity and skill” are “Stronger, bolder, shrewder” than the feeble, who gather only “chance blossoms.” Ironically, however, there seem to be exceptions to Darwinian “law.” The oiler is the only one who dies in the surf while trying to reach shore. He dies, as Solomon suggests, “because he did not retain the lesson of the sea that he learned while
in
the boat—the value of group action—and because, obeying his own hubris, he deserted the group at the end.”
²⁶
Or perhaps he is simply unlucky, a chance victim struck by the dinghy when it is flung ashore by a wave.

 

More than any other American writer of his generation, Stephen Crane pointed in the direction of literary modernism. What other author before the turn of the twentieth century would have depicted the men in the open boat from a point of view
above
them on the open sea? Yet Crane adopts precisely that perspective at one moment in the story: “Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque.” The modulation in point of view stuns the reader, much as Hemingway would surprise his audience when, in the middle of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), the narrative abruptly shifts to the point of view of a lion. Little wonder that Hemingway considered Crane the author of two great short stories, “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel.” Hemingway also reprinted
The Red Badge of Courage
in its entirety in his anthology
Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time
(1942) because he thought it “one of the finest books of our literature.”
²⁷
Little wonder, too, that the modernist poet John Berryman published one of the first Crane biographies in 1950. Stephen Crane's best writing appeals to a modern sensibility and, like vintage wine or choice brandy, it seems to grow more subtle the longer it ages.

1
.
The Correspondence of Stephen Crane,
ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 323.

2
.
Correspondence,
p. 99.

3
. W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,”
Harper's Weekly,
8 June 1895, pp. 532-33; Hamlin Garland, “Books of the Day,”
Arena
8 (June 1893), pp. xi-xii.

4
.
The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871
-
1900,
ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New York: Hall, 1994), pp. 91-92.

5
. George Wyndham, “A Remarkable Book,”
New Review
14 (January 1896), pp. 30-40; [Edward Marshall,] New York
Press,
13 October 1895, V, p. 5; Harold Frederic, “Stephen Crane's Triumph,”
New York Times,
26 January 1896, p. 22.

6
.
Correspondence,
pp. 207, 249, 214.

7
. Edwin Oviatt, “J. W. De Forest in New Haven,”
New York Times Saturday Review,
17 December 1898, p. 856.

8
.
Correspondence,
p. 322.

9
. “The Best Recent Novels,” New York
Independent,
21 November 1895, p. 1579; William M. Payne, “Recent Fiction,”
Dial,
1 February 1896, p. 80; A. C. McClurg, “The Red Badge of Hysteria,”
Dial,
16 April 1896, pp. 227-28.

10
. A. C. Sedgwick,
Nation,
2 July 1896, p. 15.

11
. Ernest Hemingway,
The Green Hills of Africa
(New York: Scribner's, 1935), p. 16.

12
.
Correspondence,
p. 161.

13
. Charles C. Walcutt,
American Literary Realism: A Divided Stream
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 79, 81, 82.

14
. Milne Holton,
Cylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), p. 100.

15
. John Condor,
Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 63.

16
. Sergio Perosa, “Naturalism and Impressionism in Stephen Crane's Fiction,” in
Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Maurice Bassan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 88.

17
. James Nagel,
Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 1980), p. 60.

18
.
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters,
ed. George Jean-Aubry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927), pp. 211-12.

19
.Ørm Øverland, “The Impressionism of Stephen Crane: A Study in Style and Technique,” in
Americana Norvegica,
ed. Sigmund Skard and Henry H. Wasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), I, p. 248.

20
. Eric Solomon,
Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 76.

21
. Thomas L. Kent, “The Problem of Knowledge in ‘The Open Boat' and ‘The Blue Hotel,' ”
American Literary Realism
14 (Autumn 1981), pp. 262-68.

22
.
Correspondence,
p. 566.

23
. James Ellis, “The Game of High-Five in ‘The Blue Hotel,' ”
American Literature
49 (November 1977), p. 440.

24
. W. D. Howells,
The Minister's Charge
(Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1887), p. 458.

25
.
Correspondence,
p. 63.

26
. Solomon, p. 174.

27
. Ernest Hemingway,
Men at War
(New York: Bramhill, 1942), p. xvii.

Suggestions for Further Readings

Greenfield, Stanley B. “The Unmistakable Stephen Crane,”
PMLA
73 (December 1958): 562-72.

Holton, Milne.
Cylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

Monteiro, George.
Stephen Crane's Blue Badge of Courage.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Nagel, James.
Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism
. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1980.

Rogers, Rodney O. “Stephen Crane and Impressionism,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
24 (1969): 292-304.

Solomon, Eric.
Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Wertheim, Stanley. “Unveiling the Humanist: Stephen Crane and Ethnic Minorities,”
American Literary Realism
30 (Spring 1998): 65-75.

The Correspondence of Stephen Crane
. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871
-
1900
. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds. New York: Hall, 1994.

Dooley, Patrick.
Stephen Crane: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Scholarship.
New York: Hall, 1992.

Stallman, R. W.
Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography
. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1972.

Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage
. Richard M. Weatherford, ed. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

Cox, James T. “The Imagery of
The Red Badge of Courage,
”
Modern Fiction Studies
5 (Autumn 1959): 209-19.

Critical Essays on
The Red Badge of Courage. Donald Pizer, ed. Boston: Hall, 1990.

Curran, John E., Jr. “ ‘Nobody Seems to Know Where We Go': Uncertainty, History, and Irony in
The Red Badge of Courage,
”
American Literary Realism
26 (Fall 1993): 1-12.

Hungerford, Harold R. “ ‘That Was at Chancellorsville': The Factual Framework of
The Red Badge of Courage
,”
American Literature
34 (1963): 520-31.

Kent, Thomas L. “Epistemological Uncertainty in
The Red Badge of Courage,
”
Modern Fiction Studies
27 (Winter 1981-82): 621-28.

McDermott, John J. “Symbolism and Psychological Realism in
The Red Badge of Courage
,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
23 (1968): 324-31.

New Essays on
The Red Badge of Courage
.
Lee Clark Mitchell, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Rechnitz, Robert M. “Depersonalization and the Dream in
The Red Badge of Courage
,”
Studies in the Novel
6 (Spring 1974): 76-87.

Reynolds, Kirk M. “
The Red Badge of Courage:
Private Henry's Mind as Sole Point of View,”
South Atlantic Review
52 (1987): 59-69.

Satterfield, Ben. “From Romance to Reality: The Accomplishment of Private Fleming,”
CLA Journal
24 (1980-81): 451-64.

Schneider, Michael. “Monomyth Structure in
The Red Badge of Courage
,”
American Literary Realism
20 (Fall 1987): 45-55.

Shaw, Mary Neff. “Henry Fleming's Heroics in
The Red Badge of Courage
,”
Studies in the Novel
22 (1990): 418-28.

Autrey, Max L. “The Word Out of the Sea: A View of Crane's ‘The Open Boat,' ”
Arizona Quarterly
30 (1974): 101-10.

Billingslea, Oliver. “Why Does the Oiler Drown? Perception and Cosmic Chill in ‘The Open Boat,' ”
American Literary Realism
27 (Fall 1994): 23-41.

Brown, Bill. “Interlude: The Agony of Play in ‘The Open Boat,' ”
Arizona Quarterly
45 (Autumn 1989): 23-46.

Ditsky, John. “The Music in ‘The Open Boat,' ”
North Dakota Quarterly
56 (Winter 1988): 119-30.

Dudley, John. “ ‘Subtle Brotherhood' in Stephen Crane's Tales of Adventure: Alienation, Anxiety, and the Rites of Motherhood,”
American Literary Realism
34 (Winter 2002): 95-118.

Eye, Stefanie Bates. “Fact, Not Fiction: Questioning Our Assumptions About Crane's ‘The Open Boat,' ”
Studies in Short Fiction
35 (Winter 1998): 65-76.

Feaster, John. “Violence and the Ideology of Capitalism: A Reconsideration of Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel,' ”
American Literary Realism
25 (Fall 1992): 74-94.

Kimball, Sue L. “Circles and Squares: The Designs of Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel,'”
Studies in Short Fiction
17 (1980): 425-30.

Metress, Christopher. “From Indifference to Anxiety: Knowledge and the Reader in ‘The Open Boat,' ”
Studies in Short Fiction
28 (1991): 47-53.

Monteiro, George. “Text and Picture in ‘The Open Boat,' ”
Journal of Modern Literature
11 (July 1984): 307-11.

Petite, Joseph. “Expressionism and Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel,' ”
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology
10 (August 1989): 322-27.

Schirmer, Gregory A. “Becoming Interpreters: The Importance of Tone in Crane's ‘The Open Boat,' ”
American Literary Realism
15 (Autumn 1982): 221-31.

Schulman, Robert. “Community, Perception and the Development of Stephen Crane: From
Red Badge
to ‘Open Boat,' ”
American Literature
50 (November 1978): 441-60.

Vorpahl, Ben Merchant. “Murder by the Minute: Old and New in ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,' ”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
26 (September 1971): 196-218.

Wolford, Chester L.
Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction
. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Wolter, Jurgen. “Drinking, Gambling, Fighting, Paying: Structure and Determinism in ‘The Blue Hotel,' ”
American Literary Realism
12 (1979): 285-98.

Zanger, Jules. “Stephen Crane's ‘Bride' as Countermyth of the West,”
Great Plains Quarterly
11 (Summer 1991): 157-65.

Basye, Robert C. “Color Imagery in Stephen Crane's Poetry,”
American Literary Realism
13 (1980): 122-31.

Blair, John. “The Posture of a Bohemian in the Poetry of Stephen Crane,”
American Literature
61 (May 1989): 215-29.

Hoffman, Daniel G.
The Poetry of Stephen Crane
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

Westbrook, Max. “Stephen Crane's Poetry: Perspective and Arrogance,”
Bucknell Review
11 (December 1963): 24-34.

A Note on the Texts

Three distinct versions of
The Red Badge of Courage
exist: the truncated newspaper serialization, an incomplete manuscript version, and the edition published the first week in October 1895 by D. Appleton and Company of New York. Despite the debate over the past few years about which is the “authentic”
Red Badge
, like most editors I have chosen to reproduce the Appleton edition, the final version of the novel Crane revised in proof and supervised through the press, emended for consistency in minor typographical matters.

“The Veteran” is reprinted from the D. Appleton edition of
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War
(New York: Appleton, 1896); “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” from
The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure
(New York: Doubleday, 1899); and “The Blue Hotel” from
The Monster and Other Stories
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1899). “A Self-Made Man” is reprinted from its first publication in
Cornhill Magazine
, ns 6 (March 1899), pp. 324-29.