Everything is related to his vision, to his sense-perception of incidents and details, to his sense-reactions rather than to his psychological impulses, to his confused sensations and individual impressions.

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,

but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.

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.