Answer two of three of the following questions:
1)What seems to you "modern" about Stephen Crane's "When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers"? Voice? Style? Structure? Theme? Please elaborate.
2) Please follow the link below. How is its discussion or definition of "creative nonfiction" applicable to Crane's piece, "An Experiment in Misery"?
http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-truth-in-nonfiction-but-were-afraid-to-ask-a-bad-advice-cartoon-essay/
3) Morris Markey's piece, "Drift," belongs to a subgenre referred to as "the procedural." To your mind, what characteristics of the piece make it an example of the genre? How does this help with or determine the structure/organization of the piece?
Remember, we're practicing good writing here, not just literary analysis. Your comments should be crisp and clear. Avoid generalizations, tortured syntax, and muddy language.
Your response is due Tuesday, Sept. 3, 4 p.m. No late responses will be accepted -- ever.
Btw, the "youth" in "Experiment. . ." is Crane, who did the "experiment" by impersonating a tramp. A prologue to the original article in the NY Press made that clear.
21 comments:
Personally, what stood out most to me as "modern" in Stephen Crane's piece, "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers," was his use of contrast. The epileptic man and the boy he's walking with are Italian versus what we may assume is an American crowd. Also, the contrast in language between Crane's description of the spasming man and the surrounding crowd: while he describes the man's cries as "a babyish squeal" and "the sad wail of a storm-tossed kitten," he describes the crowd as "starving men fighting for bread" to witness the man's suffering, "insane to get a view of it." While the innocent man and boy suffer, the panicked young boy silently pleading for someone to save the convulsing man, the crowd becomes so consumed with bloodlust that they fail to seek assistance for what Crane portrays as a significantly long period of time (I estimated about ten minutes - in terms of medical emergencies, this is the equivalent of an hour).
The story's thematically modern as well. The story describes a tragic yet common situation during the late 19th Century, in which an immigrant's or minority's wellbeing is compromised because of social, political, or economic situations. Here, the main obstacle is not only the boy's lack of fluency in English to communicate the help he needs, but also the crowd's ability to overlook them as humans in need of help but as an objectified "other" that they're more interested in observing than saving.
2.) "Creative non-fiction," or what I've gleaned from the cartoon, is essentially using a basis of facts, memories, and truths combined with descriptions and interpretation by the reader/observer to portray an overall accurate scene. Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" does just that. He took characters that could have been any homeless, foreign lower-class person and gave them generalized attributes of the homeless in that time period.
The boy, Willie, expresses the hesitancy, paranoia, and depression we may assume most boys in his situation felt in his homeless, jobless situation. We observe his transformation into the older beggar's character at the end of the piece, a transformation Crane achieved using similar descriptions, particularly the guilty low-cast eyes and the "criminal expression" the "assassin" retains throughout the article. His use of the word "assassin" alone to describe the elder beggar throughout the piece creates an almost stereotypical anonymous character impoverished in the early 20th Century. While both the man and boy are desperate for help, the man maintains a predator-like appearance that the boy adopts by the end, something necessary to their survival.
Crane may not have been in Willie's mind as he ascended the stairs to the shelter, but his vivid description of the tomb-like cabinets and the swath of fellow homeless people splayed across the floor, we may assume, is reasonably accurate. In its accuracy, the shelter could've been any shelter in the city for either the man or the boy. Similarly, the man or boy could've been any homeless person seeking refuge in the city.
1.
Dialogue is utilized in a modern way to emphasize the excited chaos of the crowd. Quick, uninterrupted chunks of dialogue appear in two parts of the story: when the crowd is initially attracted to the scene of the old man writhing on the sidewalk and when the crowd is trying to explain the situation to the police officer. There’s no time for additional description in these two sections of dialogue—the urgency of the situation is stressed by the crowd’s barrage of comments. There’s no time to breathe. Help remains illusive the whole time the crowd guesses what’s wrong with the man. Dialogue is also written the way it sounds. Rather than writing “What the hell are you doing? Leave him be!” Crane writes out the way he would have heard it: “What th’ ell yeh doin’? Leave ‘m be!”
The story showcases on the socioeconomic divide between the middle class and the poor. This is a “modern” theme in literature that is handled well in the story by the drawing of an unmovable barrier between the classes. The boy represents the naïve immigrant unaccustomed to America. He doesn’t speak English well (“no apparent comprehension of their language”), which effectively restricts him from seeking genuine help for the old man. When surrounded by the horde of bloodthirsty onlookers (none of which help in the slightest; if anything they create more problems), the boy anxiously looks for help. The unlikelihood of hope is shown when the boy frantically looks around for help “as if assistance might come from the clouds.” God won’t save you on these streets, and neither will the people, apparently.
This socioeconomic divide being shown in the story is strengthened by the police officer’s cynical view of the very people he is paid to keep safe. He feels like he is above everyone else. “His was the rage of a placid cow, who wishes to lead a life of tranquility, but who is eternally besieged by flies that hover in the clouds.” In Crane’s description of the police officer, the public is described as “sufficiently unreasonable and stupid.” The very cynicism that separates the police officer from the crowd separates the crowd from helping the man. The man and boy are poor and lack fluency in English. Their lower class status makes them less members of the community and more of a sideshow for the expectant middle class passersby.
2.
The comic stresses using the facts of a story as your clay in order to get to the “core of the scene,” as Richard Gilbert put it. “An Experiment in Misery” is obviously fabricated to a degree, but not with any intent to change the truth behind the story. Crane obviously didn’t know what was going on in the young man’s head, but under the given circumstances the characters are not only natural and believable, but they also don’t impede the underlying truth of the story. I believe this truth is something like “socioeconomic boundaries place people under inhuman conditions that are trying on an individual’s spirit, confidence, and sense of pride and dignity.”
Literary devices accentuate this “truth” that lies at the heart of the story. Simile is used often in the story and always with a satisfying effect. The men barging into the soup kitchen are “like sacrifices to a heathenish superstition.” The “assassin” appears “like an assassin steeped in crimes performed awkwardly.” My personal favorites are when the hostel is being described. The men covering the floor “lay like the dead,” and the lockers looming over them are “like tombstones.” The use of simile compares the squalid living conditions of the homeless with imagery of death and despair. This isn’t untrue. Conditions really were as crappy as they are described. The literary flare (or, the malleability of the “clay” of the story) helps to strengthen the conveyance of the “truth” of the story without the fabrication of details or neatening up of messy facts. The story is creative and effectively makes its point while maintaining the general “truth” that classifies it under the genre of creative nonfiction.
1) A particularly modern aspect of Crane's “When a Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” is the mimetic quality between the structure of the piece and the content. The piece begins with with the man and boy “trudging” down the street, and so the paragraphs are long and meandering. When the man has his epileptic fit, there are quick, successive bouts of dialogue, mimicking the panicked crowd and their confusion: “Ah, he's got a fit! Can't yeh see!” “He's got a fit!” “He's sick!” As the excitement becomes more regular, so does the structure of the piece. The long paragraphs coincide with the timidity of the crowd as they not only attempt their own personal remedies to cure the man, but hover by with uncertainty. Crane, again, breaks into breathless, quick bouts of dialogue at the arrival of the police officer, which again stirs the crowd into excitement in their voyeurism.
The style of the piece, as well, is modernistic in the distinctly passive tone that overrides the excited crowd. Crane as the author is particularly removed from the piece, which breaks away from previous authors, in fiction as well as journalistic personal accounts, in which narrators would interrupt their own work to address readers. As the small introduction to Crane states, he wrote of himself in the third person, making his style of writing even more modern—he is present in the story, but not as a narrator who intrudes on the scene, a journalist adding his own personal experience. Rather, he is more of a voyeur than the rest of the crowd, as Crane is present, but does not make himself known in his curiosity.
3) As a “procedural” piece, Markey's “Drift” follows the official procedure in disposing of an unidentified body. After failing to be identified by a woman from Indianapolis, the body is simply marked with a number and deemed “Release for Burial.” The body is attended to in accordance to how an unidentified body should be, taken to the burial site and buried in an unmarked grave. The step-by-step list of each measure taken to the burial of body Number 48,227 alone denotes Markey's piece as being in the “procedural” genre; however, that the body continues to be referred to at 48,227 adds to the impersonal, black and white list of procedures Markey takes note of as he follows the events leading to the body's burial.
Markey adds his own literary voice to this piece, such as referring to himself as “I” and “we,” and adds a literary poignancy by returning to Police Headquarters to file the money, both of which makes his style of writing markedly different from Crane's. Like Crane, though, Markey is dominantly absent from the piece, containing his literary voice to a handful of instances, and even then, doing so in an impersonal way (“We come into a slip,” for example). The procedural nature of following a police department's methods for disposing of an unidentified body calls for an impersonal, linear, structured list. There is little-to-no room for lengthy exposition or breaks from one step to another, from marking the body as unidentified, to preparing it, to moving it to burial, thus categorizing the piece as “procedural” allows sense to be made of Markey's detached authorial voice.
2) The cartoon about creative non-fiction is essentially a point of view explaining why it is nearly impossible to portray completely accurate fiction. It must therefore be acceptable for authors to have some reasonable leeway in recording their version of true events. Crane does a perfect job of balancing fact with fiction in "An Experiment in Misery."
A depiction of the homeless youth that is Crane's protagonist is made perfectly clear through great detail. Not only do we know the youth's appearance and social status, we know his emotional state as well. "The sifting rain saturated the old velvet collar of his overcoat, and as the wet cloth pressed against his neck, he felt that there no longer could be pleasure in life." This is obviously not something that a person can take away by simply looking at someone, and unless Crane personally asked the youth what he was feeling at the time, there is no way he could have know this. Here Crane took some liberty in modifying the truth for the sake of his story, and in doing so gave the reader the ability to identify on a closer level with the youth's misery.
3) The procedural genre relies on technical detail used to sequence events. Pieces of writing in this genre are easily comparable to scenes in film because the reader is able to envision each small action taking place in the story just as a viewer of a TV show or movie can see everything that happens as the scene unfolds. "Drift" by Morris Markey follows this style very intricately.
As early as the first paragraph, we are immediately introduced to the genre with small details depicting Sergeant O'Keefe's actions. "Checking over the mornings instructions from Headquarters," "He leaned over his desk in a pleasant room with a high ceiling, on the second floor of the old red building at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue, and thumbed the sheets of paper." These details, no matter how small, move the story forward. On a larger scale, "the procedural" forms the structure of the story as a whole. The entire piece can be looked at as having three acts. The first being the dialogue determining that Number 48,227 can not be identified and must be buried that way; the second being the boat ride to the cemetery; and the third being the burial. Each of these acts is sequenced so as to have a clear narrative progression.
1) Crane's structure of "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers" is a quick and progressive, yet detailed depiction of how people desperately want to know what's happening; how people will claw at anything different from daily life. His quick and precise descriptions of the crowd, and how the fallen man had become a zoo-like spectacle for them gives the distinct feeling of this happening very quickly. Also, all the rushing and pushing that Crane describes puts the reader into the crowd, and his descriptions of the officer's, the doctor's, and the ambulance's arrivals make it seem as though the reader is just as story-hungry as the crowd. The reader can only read on as the man convulses and the crowd pushes.
When it comes to Crane's theme, there's an Einstein quote that might fit: "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because
of those who look on and do nothing." Crane's story shows that people will often opt to be the bystander, even if someone is convulsing in front of them. At the turn of the 19th century this was all too commonplace, and Crane makes the issues priority, painting the crowd as an infestation that hinders progress and recovery.
2)David Gessner's comic talks about what gives Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" its impact. Creative nonfiction can give a more organic and real description than any academic study or bureaucratic analysis. Crane uses metaphors and experience to give the slums a face. The youth, the seedy man, the assassin, and the men in the tenements are all people, but they are not known by legal name. Something like that would be trivial here, where what you see is what you get. The story is made up of things that can't be put on paper or studied in a book, but have to be lived or at least told from one who has. With creative nonfiction, Crane proves that the slums are not just a place where the poor live, but a place where one has to cherish pennies to survive.
1. What seems “modern” to me in Stephen Crane’s “When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers” is Crane’s use of voice. This piece from Crane was written in 1894, yet his voice in the piece feels incredibly modern. Crane is not actually in this piece, but as a reader you can certainly feel his presence. While Crane’s presence is certainly felt in the piece, he still gives the point of views from the crowd and surrounding characters. The way Crane described what was taking place was excellent because there was a huge commotion-taking place in the story, and that would take place if it happened now because people are always drawn to large crowds. This a "modern" piece because it use third person narrative and people today would still rush to a large crowd.
3. Morris Markey’s piece, “Drift,” belongs to a subgenre referred to as “the procedural” because it is not written one story, rather it is written in many scenes. This provides a lot of structure in the writing and allows the reader to follow the story in a much better way. All of the detail that Markey presents also makes the piece “procedural” because it solves the problem of what’s going on for the reader.
1.What strikes me as "modern" in Stephen Crane's "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers" is the author's lack of presence. The use of vivid descriptions paint a picture of the event without the author telling the reader what happened or placing himself in the story. The reader sees what happens rather than hearing it. For example, "It was as if an invisible hand had reached up from the earth and had seized him by the hair. He seemed dragged slowly, relentlessly backward while his body stiffened convulsively, his hands clenched, and his arms swung rigidly." This sounds like the objective writing associated today with journalistic integrity. Though the writing does become subjective as in the description of the police officer, "He was a man whose life was half pestered out of him by the inhabitants of the city who were sufficiently unreasonable and stupid as to insist on being in the streets."
The "slice of life" aspect of the writing also seems quite "modern". Crane describes a relatively ordinary event in order to showcase the time. The purpose of the writing seems to be to freeze a moment in time. The fact that officers had helmets, a black ambulance, stone streets, a "regular dinner twenty cents" sign. At the time these details served to illustrate the scene, today however they take us back to a different time.
3. Morris Markey's "Drift" depicts the process of an unidentified corpse from morgue to burial. Markey starts at the beginning with the Detective in the morgue explaining that the unidentified body is being released for burial. He shows each step of the way through the person responsible for the task. He follows the body from the morgue to the boat that takes the body up the East River. Along the way he discusses the brief Catholic service, the view from the boat, burials of veterans, the bodies buried in trenches. Describing the process using the people who do each job makes this "procedural journalism". The piece is almost written as a how-to, which removes the emotion that would normally be associated with such an experience. He even says "The burials are conducted twice each week... and naturally it becomes a routine for the employees" which is the only sign even hinting that this is not an everyday mundane task, as would otherwise be inferred by the "procedural" writing.
1) There were multiple examples of "modern" journalism style and techniques used throughout “When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers” by Stephen Crane. I think the overwhelming theme of “What’s the matter?” resonates with a majority of journalism coverage today. Most modern journalists and publications focus on negative topics that highlight atrocities or downfalls because people love to ask the question, “what is the matter?” The prologue to the article indicates that Crane is “less concerned with empathy or expose than with language,” and that too seems to be apparent and a modern style within his writing here. The style changes of sentence structures throughout the piece, in comparison to the events occurring in the dialogue, have a strong correlation. Short, abrupt sentences when describing a frantic scene or source is an example of this. I find this to be more useful, and modern, in terms of conveying an emotion and theme through a piece than describing the scene using flowery language, though that is a characteristic of Crane’s writing and a modern way to give the reading a more rounded picture of what is occurring at the scene. Words like “jostled” and “contortion” aid in this nicely. Cranes removal of himself from the story and abiding in the third person also echoes with modern journalism well, and give him the capability of painting the picture of what is occurring as a third party observer.
3) Morris Markey’s “Drift” is undeniably of the procedural subgenre, a genre used often for crime type articles and stories. It is procedural in the way that each separate piece of the story elaborated on a specific procedure in a chronological way, and was very specific as to how things were done in a way that was best suited to truly inform the reader and allow them to comprehend the on goings of a crime story. Quotes are used, but sparingly, which allows the piece to be less “story-esque” and more of a step-by-step, procedural type of style, which is what the procedural subgenre entails. While one may think that a procedural style story would be very rigid and monotonous, I believe Markey’s use of “I” and “we” when describing occurrences and activities within the piece allow it to feel like somewhat of an expose, and get the reader involved in a sense, to the point where they feel they are part of the procedure themselves.
In my opinion,what stood out to me as "modern" about "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers" written by Stephen Crane was the stark difference between the boy and the man who were directly effected by the situation at hand, and the crowd that inevitably gathered. The boy and the man seemed to me the most human components of the story. The boy stood at the scene in utter horror, not knowing really what to do, waiting for someone older and wiser to help him in his time of desperate need, but the only thing that found him was a crowd hungry for cruel entertainment. Crane states of a man in the crowd that he was "satisfied that there was a horror to be seen and apparently insane to get a view of it", further emphasizing the tone of the piece and the mentality of the crowd. They saw this man as a spectacle, the boy saw this man most likely as his father.
In my opinion,what stood out to me as "modern" about "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers" written by Stephen Crane was the stark difference between the boy and the man who were directly effected by the situation at hand, and the crowd that inevitably gathered. The boy and the man seemed to me the most human components of the story. The boy stood at the scene in utter horror, not knowing really what to do, waiting for someone older and wiser to help him in his time of desperate need, but the only thing that found him was a crowd hungry for cruel entertainment. Crane states of a man in the crowd that he was "satisfied that there was a horror to be seen and apparently insane to get a view of it", further emphasizing the tone of the piece and the mentality of the crowd. They saw this man as a spectacle, the boy saw this man most likely as his father.
1. What struck me as particularly modern about Crane’s “When a Man Fall, a Crowd Gathers” was not just the relevance of his theme but also the coinciding structure and voice. The first three paragraphs are an accurate depiction of the “slow trudging” of the man and the boy. Crane does not use particularly flowery language, but he does take his time setting the scene. Then instantly “the boy screamed” and the whole story transitions into chaos. To express the jumbled thoughts of boy and crowd, Crane changes the structure into short and choppy dialogue. He does not give time to describe the physical setting, so we are instead left with the feeling of the crowd. The dialogue is incomplete, rushed and effective in portraying the incomprehensible shouts in a raving crowd (“What th’ ell yeh doin? Leave ‘m be”). Just from the dialogue, we can understand the pressure and excitement among the crowd. We embody the feelings of the boy: suffocated and muddled.
The theme is timeless. Not just the hierarchical contrast between poor and wealthy, but also the truth of a crowd in a crisis. It is human nature, when confronted with an emergency, to become overwhelmed and do nothing. This is particularly true when a crowd is involved, as people will just assume that someone else will take action. Crane sums up mob mentality when he writes, "They were contemplating a depth into which a human being had sunk and the marvel of this mystery of life or death held them chained". They were chained not by compassion for the epileptic, but by bloodthirsty curiosity. They were “satisfied that there was a horror to be seen” as human beings subconsciously crave being witness to others’ tragedies.
2. The comic depicts creative nonfiction as an imagined scene born from fact. It is building a story on a foundation of truth, history and memories; however, it is nearly impossible to have every thought and quote perfectly accurate. The “core of the scene” is not fabricated while the scene portraying it could be. The details of the hostel, the assassin’s personality and the personality of the mob in the soup kitchen are based off of truths of the time period. When Crane describes the hostel as “the fumes from a thousand bygone debauches; the expression of a thousand present miseries”, the picture of the room is factual. The creative part comes in when Crane expresses the young man’s thoughts. He writes that “his chill gave him peace”, which is something Crane could not possibly know. The extra detail, however, is well placed and supports the story rather than hinder it. The shelter, as Crane describes it, is not necessarily a specific shelter from the time but a general description of what one would look like. The literary devices may not derive from straight truth, but the core of the story, time period and theme are indisputable.
1) While the world that Crane depicts is one of the past (street-cars, for example) I think the theme of voyeurism in the piece is very modern. In "When a Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers," a curious and seemingly cold-hearted crowd pushes to get a look at a man wracked by seizures, contrasting his young companion and the few people attempting to come to the sick man's aid. While the lack of help may seem dated, I believe that based on the behavior of crowds in modern day and the bystander effect, we'd see a similar scene. I suspect that one of the only things that might change would be that the bystanders would be pushing to take pictures on their cell phones. Italians were the racial minority of their day, but I definitely can imagine race and class interfering with help and producing the same scene with a modern latin@ or black individual.
2) When Crane wrote An Experiment In Misery, the objective was to chronicle the crushing conditions of living as a beggar barely fitting into boarding-houses. The experience he describes is vivid and unpleasant: in agonizing detail. However, it's unclear if every single action and every single sight happened in the way he related it; it would be very difficult to remember every comment verbatim and also relay the story, much less the experience as a whole. However, as creative nonfiction (and expressed in the comic lecture by Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour) the experience is rooted in fact. By using the main ideas and the gist of the experience as the center of the piece, Crane was able to elaborate, to use adjectives and imagery like a pointillist filling a canvas with details until the whole picture emerged. Crane didn't 'lie' so much as use an imperfect memory to re-create the experience for the audience. Creative nonfiction differs from traditional reporting in this way; rather than reporting facts and nothing but those documented events and dialogues, it uses a memory of experience to rebuild events and scenes from base ingredients as a storyteller would.
(I apologize, 'minipax' is me, this account is recycled from a past project)
1)What seems to you "modern" about Stephen Crane's "When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers"? Voice? Style? Structure? Theme? Please elaborate.
Crane’s “When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers” is a more modern piece because it takes on a mission to be a more subversive commentary of the times, peaking at the dark and light components of a society. In this particular piece, things are rather dark. The prose, poetic and descriptive, sets a pace that follows the actions of the man suffering from a seizure and the actions of those surrounding him. The most striking part, for me, was the descriptions of the leering crowd, “Those in the foremost rank bended down, shouldering each other, eager, anxious to see everything. Others behind them crowded savagely for a place like starving men fighting for bread.” The view I get of these people is one of revolting scavengers, those who need to be satisfied in some sick, dark, cathartic way by seeing the man suffer his “fit,” yet, for the most part, cannot find the bit of compassion inside them to intervene or help. It’s a bleak look at the typical New Yorker --- a solipsistic creature who often makes “egotistical gestures.” But I can’t say it’s far from the truth.
In the modernist tradition, using the kind of poetic language to shed light on the more subversive narratives gives a more human taste of what can be seen as inhumane acts.
1. “When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers,” by Stephen Crane initially struck me as less modern, because there are so many similes and metaphors used throughout the piece- writing tools I tend to equate with an “older style.” For example, his sentence, “It was as if an invisible hand had reached up from the earth and had seized him by the hair.” But the overall theme of the piece seemed pretty timeless to me- essentially the presence of the “bystander effect.” The bystander effect was named in 1964 after the death of Kitty Genovese, but it is apparent that it has always been a phenomenon, even today. Crane’s presence in the piece was certainly modern- though he approached it in third-person, his voice was undeniable. He is authoritative in his descriptions and make judgments throughout the entire piece. For example: “At last, the peering ones saw the man on the sidewalk begin to breathe heavily, with the strain of overtaxed machinery, as if he had just come to the surface from some deep water.” Another early indication that this piece is modern is that the dialogue is written the way it sounds, in its original dialect or slang. I would assume that people who had leisure time to read back then were the upper middle class and wealthy, and I don’t think either of them would prefer to read something that isn’t polished. By choosing to write these quotes in their original form, Crane is saying “screw it” to that audience and is preserving some of that culture of poverty in his writing.
2. It was interesting to read “An Experiment in Misery” and the comic strip side by side, because I definitely noticed instances of exaggeration in Crane’s piece. Through this exaggeration, he is giving the poor, faceless, anonymous people of the slums, (who middle-class readers may simply pass by on a daily basis without a second thought), an identity. One line from the comic stip that resonated with me was in reference to a female writer, and it said “She got at the core of the scene...and built her scene around it as faithfully as she could.” Crane seemed to have done exactly that in his piece, especially with his use of metaphors, similes, and pseudonyms, like “seedy man” and “assassin.”
1)The way Crane portrays the characters is the most apparent signal that “When a Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” is a piece of “modern” literature. In the first page, the dialogue is written in a way that is indicative of a specific time period (i.e. “What’s th’ matter? What’s th’ matter?” “Say, quit yer shovin’, can’t yeah? What’d’ yeh want, anyhow? Quit!”). In addition to the brief samples of dialogue from the crowd, the mention that both the boy and the man were speaking Italian as they walked down a New York City street, likely placed this story around the turn of the century. The descriptions of the mob, the cop, and the boy and man during the scene personify themes common in modern work, in particular: class issues, loneliness, and divisions. For example, the policeman, who is late to the scene, is labeled an angry, “placid cow.” He shows no empathy for the boy or the man; forget providing them with any help. It only frustrates him to be there and make his way through the crowd. Although the crowd of people finds this situation more gripping than the cop does, their enthusiasm is more if a sick one. “They frequently jostled him until he was obliged to put his hand upon the breast of the body to maintain his balance…starving men fighting for bread.” Help is only offered by a few from the crowd who do not go further than offering a few words of advice, or question, neither of which the boy can understand because he is an immigrant, and does not understand English. This shows the divide between classes. The boy and the man are of a lower class (as immigrants) and as a result aren’t treated as equal from the crowd, or even viewed as people, evident by their their reluctance to give some assistance and their interest in the scene primarily as entertainment. The themes if immigration and separation in class is further demonstrated by the boy’s reaction to the obvious disconnect between the all three parties (the boy, the crowd, the cop). Terrified, he goes into a panic as he realizes that help is not arriving immediately, and he feels alone in this “throng” of people. Because of who he is, his immigrant status, his class, he is alienated from the others. There’s an emphasis on the individual, or individual groups, and a lack of unity. Lastly, there is no conclusion like a story typically has — it just ends. It ends without any indication of what happens to the man, and the crowd is upset that they don’t know. The grim, abrupt ending emphasizes these issues of class and disconnectedness.
2) Crane’s piece is a day and night in the life of someone who has recently come into homelessness. The “Youth” takes a trip into the slums —his new “home.” He becomes acquainted with other “tattered” and “aimless” men. It is a document of lower class life at the present. Like the cartoon described, often pieces labeled “creative non-fiction” are not entirely factual, but do get to the “core of the scene.” This is clearly applicable to “An Experiment in Misery.” I’m positive that the actual name of the man who the Youth tagged along with was not “Assassin.” And Crane’s name is not “the Youth.” But those details are not important to the core of the story — the struggles of these people — which are truths. A story like this is also more effective, putting descriptions and faces to a problem. However, an introduction of context (like what was originally published when it was in the newspaper) would have helped with transparency.
Stephen Crane's ability to paint a detailed scene using the observations he gathered while witnessing the falling man and establishing a literary vessel in which the reader is able to embody stood out as an example of "modern" journalism in "When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers." Crane crafts a detailed account of the event but makes a story out of it rather than just stating plain fact. He is able to let the reader borrow his eyes and visually digest the commotion of the crowd. "Modern" journalism accomplishes this through the use of video and pictures, but Crane is able to produce the same effect through his use of literary style applied to a real event.
The webcomic's definition of creative non-fiction relates to Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" in the author's use of "gap closing." There are certain details that the author definitely could not have known (outside of being omnipresent) so instead he makes assumptions as to how things played out. As the comic points out, this does not discredit the author; the truth of the event is still presented to the reader but certain parts are added or omitted to create a concise story. This is what creative non-fiction refers to -a real story where some details need are assumed, mis-remembered, or added for the sake of the story part of the story.
The comic really tries to tackle the line writers tread when writing non-fiction: the duty to tell truth meeting with the duty to tell truly engaging stories with all of the details. He mentions authors who have failed to deliver absolute truth and were punished for it and those who were not, yet appeals to the authors sense of responsibility to his/her readers all the same. When writing non-fiction, the unwritten contract between writer and reader is dependent on a level of trust that the lessons, the feelings and all other ugly things dug up in the soul-sharing reading process are built upon that layer of truth.
“An Experiment In Misery” treads that line of truth because we’re unable to really confirm that what’s going on in the young man’s head is the capital-T truth. Crane did, however, attempt to share a story with respect to truthfulness and to tell it in a way that would inspire something more from the readers without compromising the ultimate truths in his piece. The moral lines on this one are blurry, sure, but I think the desire to do right by the reader and the subject material shines through.
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