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.