The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [9]
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
This is the view that dominates Crane’s oeuvre. In Red Badge, a defiant Henry Fleming valiantly and futilely struggles to assert his presence before an indifferent universe. In “The Open Boat,” the heroic response of four men to their plight means nothing to nature, as represented by the billowing waves of the sea. The shipwrecked must carefully steer their dinghy into each ominous wave to avoid capsizing; their only reward for surviving one threat is another huge swell right behind it. For Crane, existence demanded the riding out of many such waves that threaten to annihilate us. In the final analysis, the only being who cares for an individual’s life is the individual himself. In chapter XXIV of Red Badge, Fleming’s summary self-assessment cannot redirect civilized destiny. He cannot even communicate it to Wilson, his “friend.” It must remain private because all personal epiphanies are inexorably ineffable. Ironically, Fleming and his fellow soldiers cannot discuss among themselves their shared awakening to the realities of war. Thus, Crane attests to the isolation that each man, by his very nature, must endure. Just as Crane felt alone living amid millions of inhabitants of New York City during the 1890s, so too would Fleming dwell upon his spiritual solitude amid the 200,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in the Battle of Chancellorsville.
By age twenty, Crane’s rebellion against his family’s values would manifest itself in a variety of large and small ways. His father had composed religious tracts and had given sermons that advocated abstinence. By the time he was fifteen, Stephen smoked regularly, and he would soon drink excessively. Dr. Crane believed that games like baseball distracted an individual from developing a religious life. During 1891 Stephen became a star shortstop in a brief stint with the Syracuse University baseball team. Only his desire to concentrate on his writing prevented him from accepting an offer to join a professional baseball team. His father abhorred novels; more than anything else, his son wanted to be a great novelist. Eventually settling in Asbury Park, New Jersey, after her husband’s death Mary Crane began to fret over the bohemian manner of her son’s behavior and dress throughout his teens. She recognized his extraordinary intelligence but worried that his lack of self-discipline would channel his energies in a wrong direction. She disapproved of his youthful desire to be a writer.
In 1888 she dispatched Stephen to a military boarding school in order to curb these tendencies, but she may have had another reason. Shortly after the death of her daughter Agnes Elizabeth, Mary Crane suffered a “temporary aberration of mind.” The daily tension caused by her “critical condition,” as it was called in one newspaper, likely strained young Stephen’s still underdeveloped ability to cope. Consequently, he was sent first to Pennington Seminary in New Jersey (where his father once served as principal), which quickly proved to be ineffective, and then to the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York. Crane later remembered his days at the military school with fondness, even though he seemed to learn more through his own readings than through the curriculum itself: In the manner of the “blue demonstration” that Fleming complained about in Red Badge, Crane marched in military drills well enough to earn first