Humor in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” Essay

Stephen unfolds short romance The Bride Comes to Yellow cant is considered by many to be a masterpiece. One writer even called it the greatest story ever written. One of the reasons the story is so proper is that put out uses humor to make some serious points round people in general and the Old West in particular.In the first part of the story, Crane portrays Jack thrower and his new wife as humorous characters. Not only ar they awkward with each other, but they are also all in all out of place in the fancy railroad car that is taking them to the Yellow Sky. Crane makes us see them through the eyes of the condescending ostiary and the other passengers, who keep giving the couple stares or derisive enjoyment. Jacks fear about how the people of Yellow Sky pass on react to his marriage is also amusing because we would expect a town marshal to be brave, non afraid of the people he is paid to protect. offset II presents another uncommon office- a lone drunk is able to scare a whole town provided because Jack Potter is away. This situation is especially funny because of an ironic contrast that the reader already knows about. The man the townspeople are depending on to protect them is the same man we expect just learned is afraid to tell them he is married. Part II also includes the comical character of the unsuspecting traveling salesman, whose increasingly agitated questions about scratchy Wilson set the state for the confrontation the reader knows go away occur. Crane is in effect setting us up for the punch line of his story. First we try on about the raging, fearsome drunk who is terrorizing the town- and then we see him.In Part III we get a close look at this Scratchy Wilson, whom we are supposedly prepared for. At first glance, he does behave like a typical Wild West villain. However, we soon learn details about him that make him seem ridiculous. For one thing, he wears a shirt made by women in New York City and boots favored by little boys in New England, hardly the outfit we would expect an authentic Western villain to wear. In fact, these details are the readers first hint of what will develop as Cranes major theme that the West is no longer a terribly wild place. The lengths Scratchy goes to in sanctify to frighten a dog also show him to be a bit ludicrous as a bad guy.Scratchy may noise and bellow terrible invitations to fight, but Crane lets us know exactly how terrifying he really is The calm adobe preserved their demeanor at the passing of this small thing in the middle of the street.In Part IV, Crane finally brings his two major characters together for a showdown that is comical because it disappoints our expectations. Facing Scratchy down without a gun, Potter proves to be just as brace as we have been led to believe, but as a villain, Scratchy turns out to be pretty easily subdued. Presented with the news of Potters marriage, he loses all his menace and sadly walks away. Ironically, he is defeated not by bru te force or sheer courage but instead by a foreign condition that he does not understand. His demesne is suddenly turned upside down by Potters news. Ferocious, gun-toting drunks and the courageous town marshals who fight them are not supposed to have wives. Once the bride comes to Yellow Sky, the rules of the game are so different that Scratchy no longer knows how to play.According to one critic, Donald B. Gibson, the point of Cranes story is that by the late 1800s, the Wild West was dead, even though some people living there did not realize it. While Jack Potter has taken a big step toward adjusting to the changed world he lives in, Scratchy is simply befuddled by it.Gibsons interpretation makes sense and it gets at the join of the humor in Cranes story. However, one cannot help but suspect that Crane is doing more than simply mocking the conventions of the Western. That would make his story a funny parody, but certainly not a masterpiece. Crane is also showing us what happens t o a society in transition, a culture whose value are in a state of flux. A simple child of the earlier plains, Scratchy Wilson is an anachronism, a man who finds himself out of place historically. Luckily, he has the good grade and good sense to realize his predicament and walk away from what he cannot understand. But who knows- perhaps some day hell find himself a bride and bring her back to Yellow Sky.