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Stephen Crane’s Irony, Zen, and Little Men
Jonathan Wood
In two previous essays, I have discussed the unusual correlation
between Stephen Crane’s work and life and Zen Buddhism. In this paper, I
would like to further the discussion by examining aspects of Crane’s style
with particular respect to his use of irony, followed by examples from his
writing to show how he uses irony and Zen concepts with some of his main
characters to show how unZen-like they are（in a future essay, I’ll show how he
uses the same ideas to show how other characters are the opposite）
. He shows
them to be vain, deluded, egotistical, humorless, artificial, judgmental and
without compassion, all examples of behavior that doesn’t fit Zen. I use the
terminology “Little Men” to describe them because that’s how he described
the main characters in some of his earliest works and they are good
examples of what Crane means by someone who is “unZen-like” in behavior.
In Crane’s earlier works he isn’t so subtle about how he expresses his
characters, but, as he matures, so too does his style and his way of depicting
them. Two Sullivan County sketches and two later short stories will be
examined.
There are many values of Buddhism and Zen that can be related to any
author’s life and works. The best-known proponent of Zen in literature is R.
H. Blyth in his 1942 classic Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics.
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The following list is original, however, and has been distilled from various
readings and study to represent the core values of Zen that can be found
specifically in how Crane lived his life and in how and what he wrote.
Zen-Crane Concepts
Dealing with the Outer, Physical World
1 ．Transitory life/Impermanence/Change/Indifference to life and death
2 ．Simplicity/Clarity
3 ．Absurdity/Paradox/Illogicality
4 ．Daily activity/Ordinary life/Diligence
5 ．Love of Nature
6 ．Humor
7 ．Limitations of language
Dealing with the Inner, Mental World
8 ．Non-attachment/Detachment/Controlling desire
9 ．Anti-egotism/Selflessness
10．Directness/Direct experience
11．Essential nature/Naturalness/Primitiveness
12．Non-intellectualism/Intuition/Mushin（no-mind）/Munen（no-thought）
13．Being truthful/Honesty/Reducing delusion to see reality
Dealing with Others in Society
14．Lack of prejudice/Not being judgmental/Fairness/Impartiality
15．Compassion/Kindness/Empathy
Rather than repeating these each time one comes up, I will refer to
them in the following pages by the letter “Z” and a number that corresponds
to the appropriate concept. For example, Z5 would relate to a “love of
nature” in Crane’s writings, while Z13 would show the importance of
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honesty or how we delude ourselves. This is particularly relevant to some of
Crane’s heroes and to the discussion of irony in his works.（See Wood, “Fifteen
Zen Concepts” for a more detailed explanation.）
Crane’s Style
To appreciate Crane’s writing to its fullest, it is necessary to have an
understanding of his style. One word often used to describe it is “unique,” as
shown in one of the most perceptive of the early critiques of his work, by
Edward Garnett in Academy in 1898: “. . . his art is always just in itself,
rhythmical, self-poising as is the art of a perfect dancer. . . . an exquisite and
unique faculty of exposing an individual scene by an odd simile, a power of
interpreting a face or an action, a keen realizing of the primitive emotions─
that is Mr. Crane’s talent.”（Quoted from Weatherford, 221）Garnett’s comments
also touch on two important points of Crane’s style: the odd simile（Z3）and
the primitive emotions（Z11）. While he is often described as a naturalist or a
realist or, more commonly, an impressionist （Conrad’s view）, some critics
didn’t know quite what to make of his style. Solomon calls him an “eclectic
novelist, capable of a wide range of effects,” （4） while Holton suggests
Crane’s style as being one of “dramatic impressionism,” although he also
writes that it is “too individual merely to be identified by label.” （76）
Halliburton somewhat concurs by saying,
At an age when most writers are struggling with influences or
snatching at novelties for the sake of novelties, Crane crafts an
unmistakable style. Not less remarkably, while still in his twentyfirst year he begins the recasting process that produces a series of
styles or at least very distinctly marked stylistic patterns, all
unmistakably his own, but each, in notable respects different from
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the others.（2）
Berryman comments that “Crane was perhaps as original as an author can
be, and be valuable.”（264）He also believes（fitting in with Z11 and Z12）“There
is first the question, baffling to most of his friends, his critics, and his age, of
whether Stephen Crane did not write almost entirely from inspiration. His
work seemed to come from nowhere, prose and poetry alike.”（267）In short,
Crane’s style was unique.
In spite of Crane’s “changeable” style, four elements shine through
every variation. These are its primitive, animistic nature, and his use of
color, odd similes, and irony. These have counterparts in Zen as well. The
first is related to Z11, essential nature, being natural, almost to the point of
primitivism in the sense that enlightenment makes one feel as one with all of
existence─the most basic state imaginable. As Armstrong states, “Nibbana,
therefore, is found within oneself, in the very heart of each person’s being. It
is an entirely natural state”（79）In Crane this aspect occurs frequently in
his poems, but even in his prose he often uses animistic imagery whereby
parts of nature are anthropomorphized, often to comic effect. In The Red
Badge there is a running gag of artillery being described as being grumpy,
ill-humored men.
Crane’s use of color came about, according to Frank Noxon, from
Crane’s reading Goethe’s Farbenlehre（perhaps one of the few uses he got from
his studies at college）
, which deals with the symbolic nature of color and its
effect on the human mind. Noxon reported that, “Upon Crane this had made
a profound impression and he had utilized the idea to produce his effects.”
（Quoted in Wertheim, Log, 59）In Crane’s early works he often used the color
red and its variations, sometimes in novel ways, such as “The little man sat
down and swore crimson oaths.”（from “The Octopush”）or “He ended a red
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oration with a roar”（from “The Mesmeric Mountain”）or even in the newspaper
piece “The Broken-Down Van,” where the word “red” appears 12 times in
the first 22 lines. About the color red, Berryman writes, “A psychologist
lately called red the most panicky and explosive of colors, the most
primitive, as well as the most ambivalent, related equally to rage and love,
battle and fire, joy and destruction.” （289） There’s that word “primitive”
again, not to mention “battle,” which fits Crane’s war stories, but, in fact,
most of his stories are about a battle of some kind─Maggie is rife with
fighting and others show fights with nature or within the protagonist. Holton
notes that Crane’s use of color was unusual: “He never used a variety of
colors in elaborate descriptions; rarely did he use color as a device of
characterization. Color, when used descriptively by Crane, occurs in quick,
bold strokes.”（77）Color was simply another way to look at something, but,
as shown above, a new and different way. It is sudden and sharp, and forces
the mind onto a different road. The link to Zen is probably closest to Z12,
using intuition or mushin （no-mind）, in the sense that Crane used colors
instinctively, as being right for that phrase or that moment in a story or
poem.
The odd similes would follow this same reasoning, Z12, as being from
somewhere in Crane’s imagination because no one had ever thought of
similar ones before （and few writers since） and they also fit with Z3,
illogicality, paradox and absurdity. Two are given above, “crimson oaths”
and “red oration,” so they sometimes go with colors, but Crane had some
even more remarkable ones, such as to show a man’s disappointment he
wrote that he had a “face like a floor.” In a bizarre way, it works. He writes
of a Mexican baby “in the shape of an alderman.” Similes like “a spread of
water, like fans of flame,” comparing water to fire, are paradoxical. His most
famous one, perhaps one of the most famous in American literature, is in
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The Red Badge of Courage: “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a
wafer”（apparently referring to the red sealing wax used on letters）. Crane’s mind
worked in mysterious ways, traveling down paths seldom seen in literature,
which is one of his most exciting attractions. Holton again, who wrote one of
the best critiques on Crane’s style: “One is immediately struck in reading
Crane, even in his early prose, by the rich and unusual figurative language
which is employed. Crane’s figures─for the most part similes and
occasionally implicit metaphors─achieve comparisons which demonstrate an
incredible finesse of imagination.”（80）Crane simply thought differently from
most people. Part of that comes from his being a keen observer and listener,
but he also took the next step of thinking about what he saw and heard and
comprehending it, then filtering it through his blood, as he told Willa Cather,
to come up with the right ways of saying what he needed to say.
The fourth aspect of Crane’s style is irony. Morgan writes, “The
strongest personal flavor in his work was irony, a difficult art which he
mastered better than any other American writer.” （14） Irony, however,
would not seem to be compatible with Zen. The simplest meaning of irony is
that of saying one thing but meaning another. How can that be reconciled
with Zen’s straightforwardness, its simplicity and clarity, its direct
experience? The answer to the simple form of irony is in Z3─Zen’s love of
absurdity, paradox and illogicality. Koans live in that land, where one of their
main points is to show how meaningless language is, how it can confuse
because talking about reality is not that reality, as Crane himself often
mentioned. In Zen tradition the teachings of Buddha have been likened to a
finger pointing at the moon─they can show one the way, but they aren’t the
way themselves. However, Crane’s irony was rarely that simplistic. He used
it in many different ways, as Berryman points out, “I want to say something
of an aspect of his art Garnett correctly thought fundamental, namely, his
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irony. . . . Crane’s work is a riot of irony of nearly every kind.”（277）Cady
writes, “Along with his other gifts, a striking fact about Crane is his
possession of an irony so powerful, so deep, and so his own at an age so
young.”（96）
In fact, irony has a long tradition, dating back to early Greek comedy,
which “presented a contest between the Alazon（Imposter）and the Eiron or
Ironical Man: after vauntings and pretensions, the Alazon is routed by the
man who affects to be a fool. The Impostor pretends to be more than he is,
the Ironist pretends to be less.”（Berryman, 278）Things are not what they
seem, a basic tenet of literature, but one which requires a certain
sophistication on the part of the reader. In fact, irony is implicit in the act of
writing fiction. The artist wants to make the story “real” enough for the
reader to see it as being part of life, yet at the same time knowing that it’s
not real. The dual nature of irony, that of “reality” versus “appearance” is
one that Crane used to great advantage.
There is a form of irony called romantic irony（in the sense of a roman, or
novel）that was suggested by Friedrich von Schlegel（1772-1829）and which is
based on the assumption that irony inheres in the very fact of being
an artist, and that ambivalence is the only viable stance in a
paradoxical world. . . . Sometimes called philosophical irony, it
seeks to triangulate the truth by assuming a variety of mutually
exclusive points of view. The writer employing romantic irony
stays detached, noncommittal, nonjudgmental . . .（Winokur, 36）
Crane’s style of writing does just this, most noticeably in The Red Badge of
Courage, where the reader mostly sees events through Henry Fleming’s
eyes, but also from the point of view of a non-omniscient narrator who is,
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indeed, detached and noncommittal（this can be seen as connected to Z8, not
being attached to the world）, although not completely nonjudgmental, even
though that would fit in with Z14. Crane presents his characters to us from
a particular viewpoint, although he claims to be against “preaching” in his
work. Pizer writes, “Crane’s irony emerges out of the difference between a
value which one imposes on experience and the nature of experience itself.
His ironic method is to project into the scene the values of its participants in
order to underline the difference between their values and reality.”（111）
Their “values” are Crane’s way of telling us what’s “wrong” with them. The
characters that he disapproves of the most are the ones he treats with the
most irony. These characters particularly appear in his early works such as
the “little man” in the Sullivan County sketches, everyone except Maggie in
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Henry Fleming in The Red Badge, and, to some
extent, George in George’s Mother. What these characters all have in
common is that they are unZen-like.
Using the Z-concepts shown earlier, one can examine how Crane’s nonZen heroes are depicted. They are seldom indifferent to life and death, often
shying away from dead bodies when they see them and having difficulty
touching them, Z1. They are rarely simple and clear, Z2, and often have
complicated feelings or vivid imaginations that show their egotism（Z9）and
their intellectualism, whereby they try to analyze things too much（Z12）.
Rather than enjoy the pleasures of daily life, they search for excitement or
adventure or just try to make it appear in their regular lives（Z4）. They
often care little for nature, or if they notice it, imagine strange things
happening in it or to it（Z5）. As for Z6, humor, many of them are humorless
or else end up getting laughed at, rather than with. They talk a lot and often
take refuge in words─they are rarely the strong, silent types（Z7）. They act
on impulse, hardly ever controlling their wants and desires（Z8）. Even when
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they have some kind of direct experience, they seldom learn from it and it is
hard for them to be clear and direct（Z10）. These nonZen-like characters are
almost never in touch with their basic selves and prefer artificial things to
real ones （Z11）. They are not always honest and frequently delude
themselves by “thinking” too much（Z13）. In dealing with other people, they
are almost never fair and nonjudgmental, nor do they show compassion or
kindness（Z14, Z15）. By treating them ironically, Crane indicates that they
are different, and not in a good way. He uses the basic meaning of irony, that
something shown is other than what is real or what one expects, to point out
these characters.
Colvert puts it this way:
The Crane hero creates a flattering image of himself and of the
world, whereas in the narrator’s ironic viewpoint man is
insignificant, blind to his human weakness and the futility of his
actions, pathetically incompetent in the large scheme of things . . .
For the Crane story again and again interprets the human situation
in terms of the ironic tensions created in the contrast between man
as he idealizes himself in his inner thought and emotion, and man
as he actualizes himself in the stress of experience. In the meaning
evoked by the ironic projection of the deflated man against the
inflated man lies Crane’s essential theme: the consequence of false
pride, vanity, and blinding delusion.（Quoted in Stallman, 41）
The “deflated” man who actually does the action is the Eiron, while the
“inflated” man, who deludes himself, is the Alazon. The distinction between
appearance, what one deludes oneself into thinking（and self-delusion is what
Buddha taught most strongly against）
, and reality（enlightenment for the Buddha）
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is shown clearly here. Crane’s use of irony with certain characters in his
stories is a way of pointing out their lack of Zen-ness, that is, their similarity
to how most of us think and behave because we are prisoners of our
delusions about the world. In a different essay, Colvert writes that, “Crane’s
irony is directed . . . against heroes［who］rarely have . . . a clear insight into
their own limitations for seeing the world clearly and truly.” （Quoted in
Holton, 85）They aren’t enlightened. Crane’s later heroes, on the other hand,
like Timothy Lean, are rarely treated ironically simply because they aren’t
foolish and have a sense of how the world works─they see it “clearly and
truly.” Holton writes（Z12）, “The capacity of a character to see clearly is
admired by Stephen Crane, delusion or inadequacy of vision is often
ridiculed or treated with contempt . . .”（8）It’s as if Crane’s trip out West, or
possibly, the success, money and self-confidence he reaped from the good
reviews and sales of The Red Badge changed his way of thinking about
writing. Most writers put themselves in their stories at least to some extent,
and perhaps after his breakthrough he had enough confidence in himself to
stop writing about negative, unZen-like characters and write more positively,
although he returns to them at times to remind us of our shallowness or to
contrast them with characters he admired.
Two Sullivan County Sketches
In the following examination of two sketches and two short stories, the
focus will be on the ironic treatment of the main characters and their
relationships to Zen principles. The first two stories to be considered are the
Sullivan County sketches, “Killing His Bear,” and “The Mesmeric Mountain.”
“Killing His Bear” begins with some typical Crane anthropomorphisms
as “. . . green pines huddled together and sang in quavers . . .,” “Icicles
dangled from the trees’ beards, and fine dusts of snow lay upon their brows,”
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and, in some foreshadowing, “. . . a dismal choir of hemlocks crooned over
one that had fallen.”（506. All references to Crane’s writings are from Levenson.）
These can be Z3 and Z12. This animistic portrayal of trees as singing,
mourning, growing beards and having brows shows quite a different view of
nature than later works（especially the “indifferent nature” of “The Open Boat”）. It
gives the feeling of an audience for the scene that’s about to be played out.
It is late in the day and the “dying sun created a dim purple and flamecolored tumult on the horizon’s edge and then sank until level crimson
beams struck the trees. As the red rays retreated, armies of shadows stole
forward. A gray, ponderous stillness came heavily in the steps of the sun.”
Here are many of the usual Crane touches, such as color（purple, flame-colored,
crimson, gray）
, odd similes（gray stillness）, war imagery（armies of shadows）to
go along with the person-like attributes of nature. It works, however, giving
the feeling of an active, involved nature where things happen, Z5.
The “little man,” based on Crane himself for the most part, perhaps also
on one of his three regular camping companions, is under one of the pines,
freezing in the cold, stamping on the snow to try to keep warm. As he waits,
he hears the sound of a hound coming toward him, its howls informing him
that it is in pursuit of a bear. Crane’s description of this sound is curious, yet
fascinating. “A hound, as he nears large game, has the griefs of the world on
his shoulders and his baying tells of the approach of death. He is sorry he
came.” （506） As with so much of Crane, the odd placing of cares on the
shoulders of a hound works because it opens up the imagination of the
reader to consider such a possibility. The description of the “little man”
given next is sexual, again, a foreshadowing of what will come later: “The
long yells thrilled the little man. His eyes gleamed and grew small and his
body stiffened to intense alertness.” As the bear nears him, the hound’s yelps
growing louder, the little man waits with “nerves tingling and blood
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throbbing.” As it gets even closer “he could hear his blood surge in his
veins.”（507）When the animal appears, the man moves slightly and the bear
swerves away from him. As he aims, “mad emotions, powerful to rock
worlds, hurled through the little man,” but he keeps his nerve. “When the
rifle cracked it shook his soul to a profound depth. Creation rocked . . .”
（Perhaps Hemingway was thinking along these lines when his characters felt the
“earth move” during sex in For Whom the Bell Tolls.）
The shot hits, the bear stumbles but continues on, the little man in
pursuit “with a roar.”（508）Finding blood on the snow, he bounds into the
air and charges onward to find the dead bear with blood sprinkled on the
snow around it. Crane’s description of the bear is horrible: “A mad froth lay
in the animal’s open mouth and his limbs were twisted from agony.” The last
paragraph is full-force irony: “The little man yelled again and sprang
forward, waving his hat as if he were leading the cheering of thousands. He
ran up and kicked the ribs of the bear. Upon his face was the smile of the
successful lover.” Upon first reading, the last line seems out of place, but a
careful rereading links it to what was previously written. There is a
connection between sex and conquest, particularly from a male point of
view, but this goes beyond that into the realm of sickness. The irony used in
this passage is that Crane writes so positively, so thrillingly of the “little
man’s” actions, in such stark contrast to the “agony” of the bear, that his
disapproval is clear. Benfry writes, “That last sentence, in its cruel irony,
prefigures Crane’s later writing. This rib-kicking hunter is only a lover in
the Wildean sense that you always kill the thing you love.”（58）But this isn’t
about love─it’s about proving one’s manhood, one of the many delusions
men have about life. The “little man” has no compassion in him, no sense of
Zen.
“The Mesmeric Mountain” is also from Crane’s earliest career. It was
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credited as being written in 1892 along with the other tales from Sullivan
County in the Virginia edition of Crane’s works, though not published until
after his death, in 1902, which might be why Stallman reports it as being
written in 1899（see page 485 of his biography）. But it is of a tone with the
others, featuring the “little man” again. It begins with him smoking a pipe
and contemplating “an irregular black opening in the green wall of the forest
at the foot of the hill.”（512）It’s a faint road and he wonders where it leads.
A gray rabbit appears and the man throws a stone at it, chasing it away
through the opening. “Green, shadowy portals seemed to close behind him.
The little man started. ‘He’s gone down that roadway,’ he said, with ecstatic
mystery to the pines.” The irony is already present, as he overstates his
feeling. The pudgy man appears, another of the camping gang, and informs
the little man that the road leads to “ol’ Jim Boyd’s over on the Lumberland
Pike.” He doesn’t believe him and after lunch continues to regard the “door
to the forest.”（513）He finally can’t stand his curiosity and heads down it
“from the noise of the sunshine to the gloom of the woods.” Can sunshine be
noisy? Certainly, in this context of bright and dark, it fits as noisy and quiet.
Already, the little man is deluding himself into making a mystery of
something that clearly isn’t, almost to the point of the reader wondering
what his problem is.
As he walks and walks, he finally comes to the end of the road, then
climbs a “bearded” pine only to find Jones’s Mountain. He heads away from
it, searching for the Lumberland Pike, only to come out into a clearing facing
the mountain. He sits down and contemplates the summit. “The little man
and the peak stared in silence.”（514）It’s not clear that they are staring at
each other, but suddenly the man cries out, “For the love of Mike, there’s
eyes in this mountain! I feel ’em! Eyes!” He falls down and when he gets up,
shouts ‘It’s comin’!” The next line reads, “The mountain was approaching.”
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This seems to be the narrator saying this, supporting the man, but it could
also be the narrator showing the reader what the man sees happening. The
distancing by Crane is interesting, if not a little confusing, but it’s a
technique he uses often in The Red Badge, which he was to begin writing
early the following year.
The little man runs away from the mountain, only to find himself at its
foot, where he grovels until he feels the heel（nice touch, with foot）of the
mountain about to crush his head. He jumps back, throws stones at it
（fighting fire with fire?）and then finally attacks it, scrambling up its side. “The
peak swayed and tottered and was ever about to smite with a granite arm.
The summit was a blaze of red wrath.” （515） This is Z3, but also, in its
overstatement, Z6. As before, this must be what the man thinks, but it is
written simply, plainly, as though it were fact. Crane is playing with the
point of view, but it gives pause to the reader, who has lost any trust in
what the little man says. He finally achieves the summit and gets hit with a
dose of irony: “Immediately he swaggered with valor to the edge of the cliff.
His hands were scornfully in his pockets. . . . ‘Ho!’ he said, ‘There’s Boyd’s
house and the Lumberland Pike.’” As he stands proudly atop his conquest,
finding out what he was already told, the story ends with the line, “The
mountain under his feet was motionless.” This is a quintessential Crane
ending because it’s ambiguous. If one has been following the similar
statements up to this, one thinks this is also the view of the man─he has
conquered the mountain, he has won, it’s like the dead bear, ready to be
kicked in the ribs. And yet, there is menace in those words. The little man’s
fervid imagination（“Eyes! It’s comin’!”）has raised doubts in the reader’s mind,
as has his disbelief in what his companion said, as well as the ironic way he
is treated by the author. Suddenly the mountain whose heel and granite arm
seemed nonsensical earlier seems coiled with rage. Part of it is the modern
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horror movie meme of the hero/heroine being attacked the moment they
feel safe, of course, but there’s also the feeling that the little man needs to
get his comeuppance. This is where Crane does well with paradox（Z3）and
irony. He says, as the narrator, that the mountain is motionless, yet the
feeling in the perceptive reader is the opposite. As for the little man, he is
completely unZen-like, deluded beyond understanding with no connection
whatsoever with nature. He is egotistical and attached to the world of his
desires and wants, Z9 and Z13.
Colvert compares the story to The Red Badge of Courage, finding
parallels:
It is at once a summary of the plot of the novel and an expansion of
the metaphor by which Henry interprets his victory. There are the
familiar elements─the terror and the rage of the hero, the
hallucinatory imagery, the antagonism of Nature, the delusive
victory, the heroics, the narrator’s ironic commentary. By the time
Crane started writing The Red Badge in 1893 he had repudiated the
Sullivan County stories as immature and unworthy; but he was
never to repudiate the basic elements of these tales, for they are
expressive of his deepest sense of the meaning of life.（Quoted from
Bassan, 100-101）
Colvert is one of the most perceptive readers of Crane there is and this
essay on Crane and his use of mountains in his work is a classic. He is right
in saying that although Crane wrote in a letter to Lily Munroe “You know,
when I left you, I renounced the clever school in literature. It seemed to me
that there must be something more in life than to sit and cudgel one’s brains
for clever and witty expedients,”（Wertheim, Correspondence, 63）it must be
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taken in the context of his tendency to try to impress the women he wrote,
sometimes saying things he didn’t really believe, and, as Colvert notes, the
stories better show how he views life.
The “little man,” the protagonist of these two Sullivan County sketches,
clearly deludes himself（Z13）about his role in the world（the mighty hunter!
The conqueror of mountains!）
. He is egotism personified and Crane treats him
with robust irony in order to show how unZen-like he is and how he
disapproves of him. And yet, Crane also uses him as representative of the
common person, showing how we act at times and how we delude ourselves,
often out of a sense of fulfilling our desires（the root of suffering according to
Buddhism）, in this case to be someone special, with which Crane feels a
certain sympathy. As is common with him, ambiguity（often in the sense of
paradox, Z3） appears. In Bassan, Berryman writes of Crane that “. . . one
nearly makes out a nervous understanding that this author is simultaneously
at war with the people he creates and on their side─and displays each of
these attitudes so forcibly that the reader feels he is himself being made a
fool of.”（40）Although this isn’t quite so clear in his early works, it becomes
more of a factor in his later ones.
“Death and the Child”
Two of these later works that have main characters that are unZen-like
and therefore “failures” to some extent, are “Death and the Child” and “The
Blue Hotel.” These stories were written in late 1897 and early 1898 during
Crane’s initial stay in England, the latter soon after he finished the former.
Both of them have flawed protagonists and yet, with the maturity of a few
more years as a writer and as a person, Crane doesn’t unleash the fire hose
of irony on them as he did to the “little man.” Theirs are more nuanced
portrayals and yet they have much in common with other of his characters
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that fail the Zen test.
“Death and the Child” is a war tale, the only short story that obviously
incorporates Crane’s experiences when he observed part of the fighting
between Greece and Turkey in 1897 as a war correspondent. It begins with
a stream of refugees leaving the area of fighting. Describing them as a river,
Crane soon soars above them to capture a birds’-eye view of a bay, of distant
mountains and sky that seemed “to turn this misery inconsequent.”（943）
This is Z1, the transitory life in the face of nature, a common theme of
Crane’s. We then meet Peza, a young man going against the tide of
humanity until he meets a lieutenant in the Greek army. He addresses him
in French and we learn that he is Greek, well his father was, but he was
educated in Italy and he was there not to fight but to write about the war as
a correspondent. He rambles on, saying little while speaking much, all about
himself. In eleven lines of text, he says “I” fourteen times. This shows his
egotism（Z9）and immediately indicates his lack of Zen-ness. The officer, in
contrast, says, “these poor people” three times in three lines, a sign of where
his feelings lie. Peza continues on, stating that he now wants to become a
soldier and fight to help the people. Crane carefully contrasts the officer with
Peza, giving him a profile “stern, quiet, and confident, respecting fate” in his
dusty uniform with its crimson collar. Artillery and muskets sound and Peza
declares, “There is the war I wish to enter. I fling myself in. I am a Greek, a
Greek, you understand. I wish to fight for my country.” Of course the irony
of this is that he is speaking French, another reminder by Crane that Peza
isn’t Zen-like─like the little man in the previous stories, the more ironic the
treatment by Crane, the less Zen-like the character. Peza then bows three
times, an unZen-like formality that forces the officer to join in.
They come to a rise and Peza gets to view the battlefield for the first
time. He remembers dreams from his childhood about war, much as Henry
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Fleming does. The lieutenant hastens toward the front, Peza along with him.
When they meet some wounded soldiers, Peza decries “these poor souls!
These poor souls!” much as the officer had done about the refugees.
However, “the officer faced about angrily. ‘If you are coming with me there
is no time for this.’”（948）He differentiates between soldiers and civilians─
these men are here because they chose to be, the peasants not. “Peza obeyed
instantly and with a sudden meekness. In the moment some portion of
egotism left him, and he modestly wondered if the universe took cognizance
of him to an important degree.” Crane is making fun of Peza again, ironically
saying that he had become less egotistic when his thought was supremely
self-centered（Z9）. They continue on toward the front, entering a grove of
trees and Crane, with his love of nature（Z5）, has Peza inhale “a deep breath
of moisture and fragrance from the grove, a wet odor which expressed all
the opulent fecundity of unmoved nature, marching on with her million plans
for multiple life, multiple death.” （949） When they reach a place where
Turkish shells were landing, Peza is reminded of a foundry, with the soldiers
and their “smudged faces.” He thinks of machinery and “that if he was killed
there at that time it would be as romantic, to the old standards, as death by
a bit of falling iron in a factory.” This is Crane carrying his “iron”y a bit too
far, perhaps.
The story then shifts to the viewpoint of a child playing on a mountain
above the battleground. He is playing at shepherding and has astonishingly
been abandoned by parents in a rush to escape the fighting. When the battle
nears him, he looks down at the fields and incorporates the movements into
his game. He clearly represents true innocence in a way that Peza does not.
The first mention of death in the story comes when Peza imagines
himself a corpse walking on the bottom of the sea, so strange and weird was
it for him to find such commonplace objects as fields, weeds, faces and voices
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in such a fantastic situation. As he spends a bit of time with the wounded,
he finds “that pity had a numerical limit,”（952）a wonderful little line by
Crane. “. . . he cared for the implacable misery of these soldiers only as he
would have cared for the harms of broken dolls. His whole vision was
focussed upon his own chance.” This shows that his self-centeredness hasn’t
left him（Z9）. The lieutenant says he himself must go in a different direction
but tells Peza where to go next. Much as the unnamed soldier in The Red
Badge guided Henry Fleming to his company behind the lines, this unnamed
soldier has guided Peza, only in the opposite direction, not to safety, but to
danger, a situation not missed by the correspondent: “The officer had
fetched him into the middle of the thing, and then left him to wander
helplessly toward death.” Peza certainly isn’t indifferent to life and death（Z1）.
He blames the soldier and “resolved that on some future occasion he would
take much trouble to arrange a stinging social revenge upon that grinning
jackanapes.”（953）His thinking like this in the middle of a battlefield shows
his lack of detachment（Z8）and his lack of compassion or empathy（Z15）,
especially since he is the one who chose to go there.
When Peza finally reaches a group of officers at the front, one asks him
if he is a correspondent. He replies that he came as one but now wishes to
help. “‘I am a Greek. I wish to fight.’ Peza’s voice surprised him by coming
from his lips in even and deliberate tones. He thought with gratification that
he was behaving rather well.”（955）As usual, Peza, in his self-centeredness,
is thinking about how he looks to others. The officers ply him with questions
about the larger world while Peza watches the shells whizzing around. “Peza
was elated. The shells killed no one; war was not so bad. He was simply
having coffee in the smoking-room of some embassy . . .”（956）
Peza decides that the harmless war holds no terrors for him so he heads
toward where he thinks there is fighting, going up the mountain. He soon
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sees a man coming toward him whose jaw has been half shot away. There is
lots of blood and the soldier gazes at him, a look he withstands with
difficulty. He goes on and one of the soldiers helping the wounded man asks
Peza for assistance. “But even Peza’s fingers revolted; he was afraid of the
spectre; he would not have dared to touch it. He was surely craven in the
movement of refusal he made to them. He scrambled hastily on up the path.
He was running away.”（957）This fear of injury/death is common in Crane’s
unZen-like protagonists. It is Z1 and Z8, as well as being unnatural（Z11）. As
he climbs away from them, he comes upon another panorama of war. “Peza,
breathless, pale, felt that he had been set upon a pillar and was surveying
mankind, the world. In the meantime dust had got in his eye.”（958）This is a
touch of Crane’s humor（Z6）or even absurdity（Z3）, poking fun at Peza’s
having finally reached the grand view of War laid out before him only not to
be able to see it clearly.
He finally reaches some entrenched infantry where he states he wants
to fight, this time in Greek. A young officer points to some dead men
covered with blankets, saying Peza should take cartridges from them. After
the near miss with the wounded soldier, Peza finally meets the real thing─
the Death of the title. He can’t bring himself to touch any of the corpses but
in return for some tobacco, one of the soldiers removes a bandoleer and
gives it to Peza, who “felt that the dead man had flung his two arms around
him.” （961） Another soldier gives Peza a dead man’s rifle. His youthful
imagination takes flight as he hears the voices of the two dead men
“speaking to him of bloody death, mutilation. The bandoleer gripped him
tighter; he wished to raise his hands to his throat like a man who is
choking.” He looks around and sees a soldier calmly munching on hard
bread. “Fat, greasy, squat, he was like an idol made of tallow. Peza felt dimly
that there was a distinction between this man and a young student who
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could write sonnets and play the piano quite well. This old blockhead was
coolly gnawing at the bread, while he, Peza, was being throttled by a dead
man’s arms.” He notices that the head of a corpse has been uncovered. “Two
liquid-like eyes were staring into his face. The head was turned a little
sideways as if to get better opportunity for the scrutiny.” Even at this
dramatic moment, Crane inserts a bit of humor（Z6）. Peza can’t take it any
more. His fervid imagination gets the better of him: “he was being drawn
and drawn by these dead men slowly, firmly down as to some mystic
chamber under the earth where they could walk, dreadful figures, swollen
and blood-marked. He was bidden; they had commanded him; he was going,
going, going.” And then he was gone. Solomon writes, “Peza finds that
egoism and fear become more intense the more he sees of battle.”（110）
When he runs, some of the soldiers think he has been shot but others
know he hasn’t because they haven’t heard the “silken, sliding, tender noise
of the bullet and the thud of its impact.”（961）Others think he’s been hit in
the neck by the way he scrabbles at the bandoleer around it. Their
enjoyment of watching his flight is soon dashed when the officer calls out
the distance to the enemy. They face forward, preparing to shoot. “The
soldier with the bread placed it carefully on a bit of paper beside him as he
turned to kneel in the trench.” The contrast between Peza’s fanciful
imagination of dead men calling to him and the simple language of soldiers
preparing to fight is a good example of Crane’s sense of values. For him, the
mundane is best（Z4）, along with simplicity（Z2）and non-intellectualism（Z12）.
These are Zen qualities one finds again and again in Crane’s writing.
The final section of the story brings us again to the abandoned boy on
the mountaintop. He has stopped playing and wants food. The strange
“herding” below him loses its entertainment value and he weeps, feeling
hungry. He hears a sound and sees a strange creature drag itself over the
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edge of the hill and lie panting. He goes up to it and asks, “Are you a man?”
（963）Peza has lost the shine off his clothes: “he resembled a creature that
had been flung to and fro, up and down, by cliffs and prairies during an
earthquake. He rolled his eye glassily at the child.” The child asks him the
same question. “Peza gasped in the manner of a fish. Palsied, windless, and
abject, he confronted the primitive courage, the sovereign child, the brother
of the mountains, the sky and the sea, and he knew that the definition of his
misery could be written on a wee grass-blade.”
Koan question: Are you a man?
Koan answer: Gasping in the manner of a fish.
This is the story of another “little man”（Halliburton comments, “Peza is a
little man who never grows large”（162））who also goes up a mountain, though
with a rather different kind of “battle” taking place. Instead of fighting the
mountain, instead of fighting the enemy, Peza fights himself. In the internal
war between doing what he thinks is right（fighting for Greece）and his fear
of death, not necessarily his own dying but the death he sees around him,
fear wins out. This is contrasted not only with the stolid soldiers who show
the Zen qualities of treating war like a simple, daily activity（which it was for
them）
─Z2 and Z4─and who also act naturally and are detached enough to
control whatever impulses they might have to flee（Z8 and Z11）, but also the
child. The boy is described as having “primitive courage”（Z11）and also as
being part of nature（Z5）. Yet all is not lost for Peza in this situation. Unlike
the “little man” of the previous two sketches, there seems to be hope for
him. His intellectualism is gone─he “gasped like a fish.” He doesn’t answer
the child’s question, in fact, he doesn’t even talk, which makes him more
Zen-like（Z7）. Perhaps the key point to his changing status is that he isn’t
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treated ironically here. He seems to have an honest epiphany of how small
and insignificant he actually is. Holton comments about Crane’s maturity as
a writer, “No longer does his zealously ironic scorn for delusion dominate
whole stories［as in the Sullivan Country sketches］. . . Now it is controlled,
compressed, reasonable. . . . in ‘Death and the Child,’ when he represents the
innocence of Peza’s uncompleted vision, Crane is restrained and
sympathetic.” （156） Perhaps this is part of his development beyond the
“clever school of literature.” It shows growth, that while he has treated Peza
ironically and doesn’t approve of his intellectualism, at least he doesn’t leave
him stranded in his unZen-like state as he does with the “little man.” King
writes about koans in general that, “If the koan-question is to be ‘solved,’ it
must be on an emotional or a visceral level, not an intellectual one.”（21）
Peza’s “answer” is certainly not intellectual. He’s too physically and
emotionally tired to think and if he feels miserable, perhaps that’s not a bad
thing, being an emotion rather than a concept or thought. It’s hard not to
feel sympathy for Peza at the end of “Death and the Child.”
“The Blue Hotel”
The final story to be considered here has its supporters as being
Crane’s best story. “The Blue Hotel” was started while he was still working
on “Death and the Child” in England at the end of 1897 and the beginning of
1898, so it could be thought that they have some things in common. They do,
but only in the sense of Crane’s stylistic use of irony, as well as the Zen
concepts that hold true in this story as well. But differences abound. For one
thing, there is no “main” character against who others are judged. The
Swede could be considered as the protagonist, but we’re never let inside his
head by the narrator as we were in Peza’s case. We never know his
thoughts and opinions of the other characters, nor his internal worries or
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fears. The story plays out almost like a stage drama（it was made into a movie
for TV in 1977）and the distance Crane keeps from the characters makes it
hard to feel strongly about any of them. Rather than the large scale of the
Greek-Turk conflict, the story takes place entirely in a small Nebraskan
town during a blizzard, giving it a claustrophobic feel. There is no “child,” no
soldiers, no mountains to climb, no bears to kill, no bullets or shells flying
round. There is, however, a “fog of mysterious theory,” irony for everyone,
and death.
“The Blue Hotel” opens with a description of the Palace Hotel “screaming
and howling”（799）its blue color against the winter landscape in Nebraska, a
midwestern state in the US. Pat Scully, the proprietor, wearing a hat that
made his ears stick out stiffly, “as if they were made of tin”（an odd simile）,
escorts three guests to his hotel from the train station. They are a tall
cowboy, a small, silent Easterner （Crane?） and a “shaky and quick-eyed
Swede.” Later, at dinner（lunch）, the Swede talks a lot with Scully, saying he
was a tailor in New York, but he keeps looking around at the others, finally
announcing with a laugh and a wink that “some of these Western
communities were very dangerous,” following this with a loud, forced laugh.
Scully announces that they are in the middle of a blizzard, which Crane
describes with two fascinating similes: “The huge arms of the wind were
making attempts─mighty, circular, futile─to embrace the flakes as they
sped. A gate-post like a still man with a blanched face stood aghast amid this
profligate fury.” Scully’s son Johnnie challenges an old farmer to a game of
cards, which the cowboy and Easterner watch while the Swede watches
them. The farmer and Johnnie quarrel over the game and the former leaves.
“In the discreet silence of all other men the Swede laughed. His laughter
rang somehow childish.” The others look at him strangely. Already the
Swede is showing signs of delusion （Z13）, which puts him into Crane’s
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nonZen-like category.
The four men then start playing cards. The Swede joins in nervously,
“as if he expected to be assaulted. Finally, seated, he gazed from face to face
and laughed shrilly.” He is acting unnaturally（Z11）. After playing a while, he
says to Johnnie, “‘I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this
room.’ The jaws of the others dropped and they looked at him. ‘What in hell
are you talking about?’ said Johnnie. The Swede laughed again his blatant
laugh, full of a kind of false courage and defiance. ‘Oh, you know what I
mean all right,’ he answered.” The Swede continues to delude himself about
the situation and uses “false courage,” not being honest with himself. The
others deny the accusation and wonder what’s wrong with him. When he
looks to his fellow Easterner for support, the little man says, after “prolonged
and cautious reflection” that he doesn’t understand the Swede. The Swede
paranoiacally backs away from them, saying, “‘I don’t want to fight,’ he
shouted. ‘I don’t want to fight!’” The others are flummoxed at his actions, but
he backs into a corner of the room, frightened and saying, “‘I suppose I am
going to be killed before I can leave this house! I suppose I am going to be
killed before I can leave this house!’” Scully comes in then and asks what’s
the matter. The Swede says, “‘These men are going to kill me.’ ‘Kill you!’
ejaculated Scully. ‘Kill you! What are you talkin’?’ The Swede made the
gesture of a martyr.”（804）Although Crane doesn’t put us into the Swede’s
head as he did with Peza, it’s clear that he is imagining things far removed
from reality, acting in an unZen-like fashion.
Scully tries to figure out what’s going on, but the Swede insists he’s
about to be killed and leaves the room. Scully asks the men again and again
to tell him what caused the problem but no one can explain it. Finally, in his
Irish brogue, he howls, “‘But what does it mane?’” He threatens to thrash his
son Johnnie, who cries out “‘Well, what have I done?’” The use of language
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to try to figure out what is the truth shows Z7, the limitations of language.
Also, the search for an explanation and Johnnie’s wondering what he has
done wrong when there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason for the
Swede’s actions show how judgmental（Z14）people are and how bothered
they are by a lack of clarity（Z2）, as well as their need to find causes for
why things happen. The Swede shows a lack of indifference to life and death
（Z1） by worrying so much about being killed. All of the characters are
acting in unZen-like ways, but also very typically human ones.
When Scully goes upstairs and finds the Swede packing to leave, he
convinces him to stay by showing him a photograph of his dead daughter
and getting him to drink some whisky. In the meantime, the three card
players discuss the strange Swede. The Easterner, Mr. Blanc, says he
doesn’t know what’s going on and then opines that the Swede’s frightened
because he’s been reading dime-novels about the wild and wooly West and
thinks he’s in it. When Scully and the Swede return, they sit around the
stove and the Swede “began to talk; he talked arrogantly, profanely, angrily.”
（810）He doesn’t understand the limitations of language（Z7）
. At supper later,
he “fizzed like a fire wheel,” controlling the conversation and meal.
Afterward he insists on playing cards again. They play for a while until
three words ring out: “‘You are cheatin’!’”（813）The Swede accuses Johnnie
of this and the other three men scramble to keep the two apart, while all
five of them shout to be heard but without success─the limitations of
language. The Swede won’t retract his claim that Johnnie cheated and
Johnnie denies he did, so he challenges the Swede to a fight.
The men struggle outside into the powerful wind. The Swede thinks
they will all gang up on him. Scully tries to tell him they won’t but the “wind
tore the words from Scully’s lips and scattered them far a-lee,” more
evidence for the uselessness of language（Z7）, or, as Solomon writes, “The
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wild storm comments on man’s puniness and stupid verbosity by tearing
their words out of their mouths and scattering the valueless arguments out
of hearing.”（266）The men reach the sheltered side of the hotel where they
can at least speak again. The fight begins, the Easterner feeling that it was
“an abomination.” The cowboy shouts, “‘Go it, Johnnie; go it! Kill him! Kill
him!’”（817）Johnnie is knocked down and his father and the cowboy give
him time to recover before they fight again. They go back at it and the
Swede knocks him down again. He then leans against a tree, catching his
breath, where the Easterner sees him as a “mysterious and lonely figure.”
（818）Johnnie is done for and Scully announces it to the Swede, who goes
back into the hotel. They follow him in and after Johnnie is taken away by
his mother and sisters to be cared for, the Swede comes down with his
suitcase. Scully says he doesn’t owe anything and the Swede jeers at the
cowboy, mimicking his ‘Kill him!’ “He was convulsed with ironical humor.”
（821）This is a mention of irony but it’s done by someone who isn’t Zen-like.
The Swede will “pay” for it later on in the story. The men, on Scully’s
orders, take it without responding. Once the Swede has left, they shout how
much they would love to beat him up─empty blathering about nonsense, all
talk and no action, the antithesis of Zen.
The Swede stumbles through the night, following a line of “little naked
gasping trees”（more of Crane’s unusual imagery）, heading toward the center of
the town. He eventually finds a saloon and enters. The bartender barely
speaks while the Swede talks expansively. “‘I like this weather. I like it. It
suits me.’ It was apparently his design to impart a deep significance to these
words.”（823）When the bartender asks him how he hurt his face, he starts
bragging about beating up Johnnie Scully. “‘He will be pretty near dead for
some weeks, I can tell you. I made a nice thing of him, I did. He couldn’t get
up. They carried him in the house.’” The Swede’s egotism is getting the best
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of him （Z9） He is also stretching the truth （Z13） and showing little
compassion （Z15）. He is becoming a shining example of one of Crane’s
unZen-like men. He tries to get four men at a nearby table to drink with
him, but they decline. Two of them are businessmen, one a district-attorney
and the fourth a gambler who dresses nicely and has a wife and children. He
is admired “in the strictly masculine part of the town’s life.”（824）
The Swede continues drinking whisky while “babbling” at the
bartender. He finally insists that the men at the table drink with him, all the
while being told “Ssh!” by the barkeep. Where Peza’s imagination ran away
with him（too intellectual, Z12）it is the Swede’s mouth（limitations of language
Z7）that gets him in trouble. The men decline briefly─they aren’t talkers as
the Swede has become. He finally walks over to the table and puts his hand
on the gambler’s shoulder, insisting he join him for a drink. “‘Now, my boy,’
advised the gambler kindly, ‘take your hand off my shoulder and go ’way
and mind your own business.’ He was a little slim man［another of Crane’s
‘little men’］
” The Swede then goes too far:
‘What? You won’t drink with me, you little dude! I’ll make you then!
I’ll make you!’ The Swede had grasped the gambler frenziedly at
the throat, and was dragging him from his chair. The other men
had sprang up. The barkeeper dashed around the corner of his bar.
There was great tumult, and then was seen a long blade in the
hand of the gambler. It shot forward, and a human body, this citadel
of virtue, wisdom, power, was pierced as easily as if it had been a
melon. The Swede fell with a cry of supreme astonishment.（826）
The other three men “tumble out of the place backward” while the gambler
calmly wipes his knife on a bar towel and tells the barkeeper that he’ll be at
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home. The bartender runs out of the bar as well. Up until now, Crane has
rarely used irony but here he shows that the Swede was right─the West is
a dangerous place, with people getting killed in bars although the reactions
of the men other than the gambler show how rare it really is. This is
brought home, perhaps too obviously, by the lines, “The corpse of the Swede,
alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt
a-top of the cash-machine. ‘This registers the amount of your purchase.’” The
Swede had bought into the dime-novel stories of the Wild West and he paid
for his investment with his life. That which he most feared, he made come
true. His actions were unZen-like and Crane treats him ironically at the end,
as he does his other characters who act contrary to Zen principles.
But the Swede isn’t the only such character in this story. In a final
section, Crane has the cowboy and the Easterner meeting up again a few
months later. It’s further west, in Montana, and the Easterner gives the
cowboy the news that the gambler was sentenced to three years for the
killing. They begin discussing what happened, with the cowboy saying, “‘It’s
funny, ain’t it? If he hadn’t said Johnnie was cheatin’ he’d be alive this
minute. He was an awful fool. Game played for fun, too. Not for money. I
believe he was crazy.’” （827） He’s remarking on the irony of the Swede
saying Johnnie was cheating when he probably wasn’t because the game
wasn’t being played for money, so there was no need to cheat. That
eventually led to the Swede’s death. The Easterner says the Swede might
not have been killed if everything had been “square.” The cowboy responds
by repeating that it was the Swede’s fault for accusing Johnnie and acting
like a “jackass.” This makes the Easterner angry. “‘You’re a fool!’ cried the
Easterner viciously. ‘You’re a bigger jackass than the Swede by a million
majority. Now let me tell you one thing. Let me tell you something. Listen!
Johnnie was cheating!’ . . . ‘I saw him. I know it. I saw him. And I refused to
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stand up and be a man. I let the Swede fight it out alone. . . . We, five of us,
have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. . . . you, I, Johnnie, old Scully,
and that fool of an unfortunate gambler . . .’”（828）In answer, the cowboy
“cried out blindly into this fog of mysterious theory. ‘Well, I didn’t do
anythin’ did I?’”
Crane’s irony is powerful here. The cowboy means to say that he didn’t
do anything wrong, but what he actually says reinforces the Easterner’s
belief that he, along with the others, didn’t do anything right. None of them
followed the eight-fold path of right “action, effort awareness.” They were
judgmental（Z14）and without compassion for the Swede（Z15）, as well as
not being honest（Z13）. The cowboy keeps on thinking this way, but the
Easterner at least has realized that his actions were wrong. In the more
mature writing of Crane’s, he is a “little man” who gets it, who, unlike the
crowing “little man” of the early sketches and perhaps unlike Peza（who
might figure out the answer to the koan and be enlightened）
, he knows that what
he did was bad and not the right path. Wolford comments, “In early stories
like . . . ‘The Mesmeric Mountain,’ misperceptions are simple and onedimensional. The protagonists simply see order and purpose where there is
none. In ‘The Blue Hotel,’ however, misperceptions are more complex.”（31）
The Swede’s misperceptions（delusions, Z13）are more subtle than those in
the sketches and also have a deadlier outcome. The comedic strutting has
been replaced by fist-fights and stabbings. Even though he is described as
“burly” at one point, mentally, the Swede is a “little man,” because of his
egotism（Z9）. Armstrong considers egotism one of the traits Buddhism most
“
strongly tries to control: ［E］
gotism can arguably be described as the source
of all evil: an excessive attachment to the self can lead to envy or hatred of
rivals, conceit, megalomania, pride, cruelty, and, when the self feels
threatened, to violence”（102）Although the Swede has more depth than the
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“little man” of the sketches and is more sympathetic, he is still unZen-like.
The Easterner, who is a more mature version of the “little man” of the
sketches, has the most depth because he realizes how his lack of action
helped doom the Swede, which is more than can be said of the cowboy.
Perhaps one of strongest themes of the story is that of how much
talking there is compared to the small amount of action. Solomon writes,
“Those who come to the Blue Hotel talk; they don’t act.”（260）The talking is
also often misunderstood or at cross-purposes or impotent, such as when the
men talk about the Swede after he has left. Holton comments, “Throughout
the story the reader is reminded of their failures of communication,”（238）in
spite of all the talking. Perhaps one reason that Crane decided not to put the
readers inside the mind of any of the characters（as he did with Peza）was
that it made the story more reliant on speech, which he used ironically to
show its ineffectiveness. It’s a tailor-made example of the limitations of
language, Z7, one of the basic tenets of Zen.
There is a further intriguing point to “The Blue Hotel,” one espoused by
Milne Holton in his excellent analysis of Crane, Cylinder of Vision. Although
perhaps more clearly articulated in “The Open Boat,” there is a growing
sense of a lack of cause in the world. Holton writes, “Thus we arrive at the
final irony of Crane’s story . . . the reader of the final pages of ‘The Blue
Hotel’ must sense, along with the multiplicity of causation which Mr. Blanc
proposes, the utter randomness, the utter absence of cause, which─in spite
of all this self-serving prattle about causation─pervades the story. Crane
had been interested in the absurd and random nature of reality in other
stories.”（240）Notice the use of absurdity, Z3. For most dualistic Westerners,
the world is divided into causes─there is a right and wrong, a good and bad
and these must be caused by something. Christianity posits God as the
ultimate cause of both good and evil（although the latter is usually ignored）, but
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even the scientific mind, which more often than not eschews religion, wants
to find causes for how the world operates. This is fine for mechanical
processes but isn’t so successful when it comes to the actions of people.
“ T］
Holton writes, ［
he very notion of causation seems man’s ultimate
conceit.”（240）He is surely referring to this passage from the story, where
Crane as narrator steps outside the actions of the characters to editorialize a
little as the Swede struggled through the blizzard after leaving the hotel:
We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity,
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. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to
be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it.
However, the Swede found a saloon.（822）
Here is the world at its most basic, a bulb of fire and ice and disease, lost in
the vastness of space. There is no cause or reason. As Crane wrote in a
poem from War Is Kind, “A man said to the universe/‘Sir, I exist!’/‘However,’
replied the universe,/‘The fact has not created in me/a sense of obligation.’”
（1335） People are on the earth because they are, not for any particular
reason, no matter how special they think they are. For Crane, the only thing
special about humanity is that they manage to survive in spite of the fire, ice
and disease, and that takes a certain kind of conceit. Holton sees “The Blue
Hotel” as an example of Crane’s “darkening imagination. For this story,
written just after ‘Death and the Child,’ offers a vision of man in a universe
apprehensionally unavailable to him, a universe in which communities offer
Stephen Crane’s Irony, Zen, and Little Men（Wood）
67
little or no comfort, a universe in which the very possibility of the coherence
of assumed causation is now seriously in doubt.”（241）
There are many parallels in this view to Zen. It sees the world as
transitory and changing （Z1）, especially in the sense that we as humans
have no control over what happens, and no matter how much we want to
“cause” things to happen or predict when things will happen because they
were “caused” to happen that way, we can’t. There is absurdity and paradox
in Zen（Z3）, the “enemies” of causality. Zen loves nature（Z5）as it is, with no
necessary reason behind what it does, just as people should be in touch with
their essential natures（Z11）and not try to intellectualize the world, that is,
look for causes （Z12）. When Buddha was asked about the origins of the
universe, he reportedly said that such a question was pointless because
there is no real way to know the answer and it is irrelevant to reaching
enlightenment. Later tenets of Buddhism concerning the First Cause reject
both the concept of a creator and the idea that the universe came from
nothing.
Conclusion
The use of Zen concepts to examine Stephen Crane’s writing came from
separate studies of both when I noticed that elements of Zen kept cropping
up in Crane’s works （they also appear in his life─see Wood, “Stephen Crane’s
Life”）. His early writing style made conspicuous use of irony to show
characters who have difficulty dealing with life, perhaps like Crane himself.
As he matured as a person and author（and this had to be rapid considering his
early death at age 28）
, he saw the world differently. The ironic treatment of
his unZen-like characters began changing as he gave them more depth and
eventually made them more Zen-like and positive, although there remained a
distinction between those he cast in positive and negative lights. It is
桜文論叢
68
unlikely that Crane had much knowledge of Zen so he isn’t consciously（Z12!）
using it in his works, but some of its concepts are interesting tools for
examining his ideas, perhaps shedding more light on common themes and
concepts that he writes.
Bibliography
1 ．Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. 2nd ed. Viking, 2001.
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Englewood, NJ, 1967.
3 ．Benfey, Christopher E. G. Double Life of Stephen Crane. Trafalgar Square, 1994.
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Press, 2001.
5 ．Cady, Edwin. United States Authors Series─Stephen Crane, Rev. Ed. Twayne
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8 ．Holton, Milne. Cylinder of Vision. Louisiana State University Press, 1972.
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12．Pizer, Donald, “Stephen Crane’s Maggie and American Naturalism,” from Bassan,
Maurice, ed.
13．Solomon, Eric. Stephen Crane: From Parody To Realism. Harvard University
Press, 1966.
14．Stallman, R. W. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: George Braziller, Inc.,
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15．Weatherford, Richard M. Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and
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16．Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul Sorrentino, eds. The Correspondence of Stephen
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Stephen Crane 1871-1900. G. K. Hall & Company, 1994.
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18．Wolford, Chester L. Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Pub.,
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