"He, the town marshal of Yellow Sky, a man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person, had gone to San Antonio to meet a girl he believed he loved, and there, after the usual prayers, had actually induced her to marry him, without consulting Yellow Sky for any part of the transaction ... his friends could not forgive him." Jack’s character shines as a coward; a man who knows no heroism. Yet towards the end of the narrative, Jack confronts his arch rival Scratchy. In a showdown of "old west" style, Jack is eventually placed, unarmed, looking down the barrel of Scratchy Wilson’s revolver. Jack then confronts Scratchy in the only manner he could. He reveals that he has no weapon and says that he would not fight back in any instance. Crane sets up an anticipated confrontation between the unlikely hero and his gun-slinging counterpart beautifully. He also proves, once again, that the exterior prowess of a man does not prove his heroism. But what does make Jack a hero? We again see Crane’s character defying death, yet the sense of heroism goes deeper than that. Jack Potter used words to save himself instead of violence or cowardly running off. The story ends on an uplifting moral of heroism by inner sanctity, not outer strength.One of Stephen Cranes most famous works, The Open Boat, is a tale of heroic proportion following the story of four castaways on a lifeboat in the ocean. As we saw in Crane’s previous works, the characters are merely atypical, run-of-the-mill, working-class men. To emphasize the plainness of his characters, Crane fails to even name all but one of his crew. The anecdote traces the travel of four men, the oiler, the cook, the corespondent, and the captain of the sunken vessel. The story captivates readers and takes them on a trip of crashing waves, deadly sharks, hardships at sea and grueling pain through which the four men go through. Defying death many times over,...
