Stephen Crane (1) (1871–1900)

Stephen Crane’s short story, The Open Boat, is a microcosm of life itself. Four men are at sea in a lifeboat after the floundering of their ship, a captain, an oiler, a cook and a correspondent. We follow their efforts to get to shore after they have spotted land but while being kept offshore by a reef that blocks their entry. There is sorrow, fear, frustration, and desperation. The indifference of nature to their situation and the feeling that they are just specs in the ocean, unimportant show more to anyone and to God, grows as they continue to struggle against what seems to be their fate.

"IF I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned -- if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

Some of the things I believe Crane wants us to contemplate when we read this story: Why do we live? If death is the ultimate, unavoidable consequence of life, why do we live at all? Do we matter in the scheme of things? If we are so insignificant, what importance can our lives have? How cruel is hope in the face of the inevitable? Is it better to see a shore you cannot reach or to die searching for it? And, finally, who deserves to survive? Why do some of us arbitrarily endure while others, just as deserving, perish?

Finally, the correspondent recalls a poem he recited, with complete indifference, in school.
A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's
tears;
But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand
And he said: "I shall never see my own, my native land."
For the first time, he contemplates the soldier as a man, as a person losing his life on a foreign shore, a man just like himself; and he feels the connection, the connection to everyman. One cannot imagine that he will resume his indifference to the fate of others. Perhaps the meaning of this experience is the rare opportunity to see yourself as part of a whole, as one, but as one of many. show less

A classic of war, this novel is what I imagined to be the antithesis to the brutality of war movies today. Crane pulls no punches when discussing the awful nature of the civil war. He hits on death, both abrupt and drawn out. He hits on fear, cowardice, and desertion. He hits on "manhood," and how young men view their part in a war.

My favorite detail about this is that it never outright states a battle or a location (I think). It is ambiguous enough to be any battle in the civil war, which show more makes it seem like it is every battle all at once. I'm sure historians can guess the battle based on details, but that's no fun. show less

The Red Badge of Courage assails from the very first line – "The cold passed reluctantly from the earth" – and doesn't let up until the sun appears through cloud on the final page, two days of battle later. Short on character and short on plot, author Stephen Crane's obsession here is with the sensory experience of battle, told from the perspective of a young American Civil War soldier about to fight his first action.

This it does very well. The young Crane didn't have any experience of show more battle (he wrote the novel at 24 and died of tuberculosis at 28) but you wouldn't know it from The Red Badge of Courage. He is excellent at portraying the thoughts a young man can spin for himself, as his protagonist, Henry Fleming, ties himself in knots and becomes his own worst enemy, rationalises his fears and his actions, and emerges from the emotional wringer altered in some unquantifiable ways. For all that Crane had no war experience – and was criticised for this from other writers of his time, including Civil War veterans – it is a very honest book. One can imagine the book as a thought experiment, with Crane imagining: 'How would it feel if I, green as I am, were to find myself in a battle? Would I stand it, or would I run?'

Crane must've had a very vivid imagination to be able to concoct this so successfully, and he grants this dubious boon to his protagonist. It is Henry's active imagination which encourages him to enlist – he has naïve, romantic dreams of glory and is disappointed when his crying mother says "nothing whatever about returning with his shield or on it", in the manner of the Spartan three hundred (pg. 13). It is this same imagination which unmans him when he's stood there, cold and afraid, facing powder and shot and the rebel yell. Crane is particularly good at the chaos of fighting, and the effects this has on the men fighting it. An exhausting march discourages the ranks of soldiers more than an enemy artillery barrage; a large part of young Henry's struggle is against the dangerous thoughts which intrude upon him in the moments of frenzied anticipation before battle even begins.

It is this lack of agency, not only for Henry but for the rest of the rank-and-file, which makes the war so hellish for them, and The Red Badge of Courage an early anti-war novel of the modern sensibility. The men are pushed from field to field, hill to hill, skirmish to skirmish, not knowing what they are meant to be doing – still less why – and this drains their courage. "It had begun to seem to them that events were trying to prove that they were impotent" (pg. 135). Ironically, it is only when they are cornered and have no options that they – both the protagonist and the soldiers as a unit – launch a successful charge and perform a collective heroic feat. In this ramshackle hell, this confusing "land of strange, squalling upheavals" (pg. 155) where officers are trying to impose some sort of order like "shepherds struggling with sheep" (pg. 123), we see the baldness of battlefield courage: too often, you didn't know what you were doing, and heroism or cowardice was only a label you could apply afterwards. If you survived.

Despite this success, Crane's book can be said to hinder itself by focusing so completely on this one aspect of writing. Though short, the book feels long and draining, as it is almost entirely descriptive writing with little in the way of plot and character. The absence of plot is forgivable, considering the nature of the piece. And our protagonist, Henry, gets some character development, of course – how could he not, when we are privy to his every thought and emotional response? – but his comrades do not. The moments when other soldiers die, or crawl away injured, should carry more emotional weight than they do, even as pen-portraits. For all his savant-like success in depicting battle, Crane's writing does have this noticeable imbalance of the inexperienced writer. Its descriptive writing is often good, but without economy: Crane catalogues each and every sensation, and won't move on from one sensation to another until he has described it in half-a-dozen ways. Nevertheless, it would be hard for even a supremely experienced writer to balance all this in a battle scenario, where chaos is the norm and a "number of emotions and events [are] crowded into such little space" (pg. 137). The book gets its intensity from this confined, bottle-like pressure, and to appreciate a book like this one you have to accept there are some things the author chooses not to do.

It is the emotional maelstrom, completely devoid of romance, combined with the general sensory experience of battle – its colours, its smoke and error, its fatigue – which is the greatest success of The Red Badge of Courage. But there are also other whispers of what would become the modern anti-war novel: the senior officer who glibly orders the men into an almost-certain-death manoeuvre as a mere feint, "speaking of the regiment as if he referred to a broom" (pg. 122), or the awareness of the battle's ultimate futility: "Individuals must have supposed that they were cutting the letters of their names deep into everlasting tablets or brass, or enshrining their reputations forever in the hearts of their countrymen, while, as to fact, the affair would appear in printed reports under a meek and immaterial title" (pg. 62). But in Crane's hands the title is far from meek and immaterial, and his prototypical success could be said to pave the way for modern war novelists like Remarque, Hemingway and the English war poets. Not bad for a 24-year-old New Yorker with no experience of battle. show less

Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is the American Civil war from a soldier's perspective with the soldier in question being ex-deserter Private Henry Fleming of the Union Army. Crane was a product of the generation born after the Civil war but this works in his favor as he renders the conflict from an archetypal soldier's perspective who regrets enlisting in the first place.

From the onset we are pushed deep into gory and visceral scenes of dying men and wholesome slaughter-the purpose of show more which Fleming fails to grasp in his immaturity. He is, after all, a boy in a man's world and this justifies his rapid retreat in the face of what he believes to be eventual death at the hands of the Confederates. Ultimately, he relinquishes his cowardice to return to the front once more and this time leads Union soldiery to victory as an ensign with the Regimental standard.

But what essentially makes Crane's novel so relevant is that he doesn't mention the slavery question behind the civil war. In the entire narrative, slavery does not figure once. This has the insightful affect of heightening Henry's youth who emerges as a young man grasping for his own purpose in the world while dying for someone else's; an alien purpose which he doesn't even comprehend or care about.

I don't believe Crane to be a closeted pacifist. What he does in The Red Badge of Courage is make a stand against youthful vagaries in which young men offer themselves up as cannon-fodder in hunt for adventure but survive only as the scathed generation. What Crane would have made out of subsequent American imbroglios in Vietnam and recently Afghanistan is open to speculation. Based on his novel, I don't believe he would have castigated the purpose behind the wars. Rather, he would have firmly forewarned young potential soldiers-are you willing to endure the horrors of war?

We do not comprehend war until we witness it. Crane offers us a dynamic imagery of its sanguinary and visceral reality. Is glory in the field of battle worth it then? As William T. Sherman concluded, 'war is hell. Crane concurs. show less