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湖南大学硕士学位论文

对史蒂芬·克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

姓名：李丽瑰申请学位级别：硕士专业：英语语言文学指导教师：王敏琴

20070401

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

摘要

本文的理论出发点是美国自然主义作家史蒂芬・克莱恩和以爱弥尔・左拉为代表的正统自然主义作家之间的分歧：自由与责任。而这也正是自然主义与存在主义之间的主要分歧。本文认为，克莱恩绝不是一个虔诚的纯自然主义信仰者。通过对克莱恩生活和作品的进一步挖掘，本文发现克莱恩和存在主义最典型的代表让-保尔・萨特之间有着惊人的相似之处，由此本文决定用存在主义分析史蒂芬・克莱恩的生活与作品，以期从与自然主义相反的角度解读天才作家克莱恩。

在对克莱恩的生活和作品进行存在主义分析之前，本文首先简单介绍了萨特的个人生活、哲学思想和文学作品，以从整体上对萨特的存在主义获得一个基本的了解，并重点介绍了几个关键的理论概念，如自由、责任、境遇、自欺、与他人的关系等，以方便后文的具体分析。对克莱恩生活的剖析主要抓住他个人生活中的叛逆性以及他与其作品关系的独特性来进行，以说明他对自由与责任的理解和重视。而对克莱恩作品的分析将分两步进行。首先是对存在主义思想表现明显的四篇小说《红色英勇勋章》、《蓝色旅馆》、《海上扁舟》和《怪物》按上文提到的关键概念作归类分析。然后再对存在主义思想表现最不明显的一篇小说《街头女郎玛吉》作特例分析，并结合女性主义得出，正是因为作者对女主角玛吉的同情和偏袒降低了对她的要求，才导致作品中自由与责任的主题不凸显。之后本文还分析了该作品中另一个存在主义主题：自欺。《玛吉》说明了克莱恩作品中存在主义思想的普遍性。

通过对克莱恩的生活和五篇重要小说的分析，这项研究不仅让我们从另一个角度对克莱恩的生活和作品有了更深入、更全面的了解，而且也让我们对自身以及他人有了更清醒的认识。

关键词：自然主义；存在主义；自由；责任；自欺；与他人的关系

硕士学位论文

Abstract

This thesis theoretically starts from the gap between the American naturalist Stephen Crane and those orthodox naturalists like Amile Zola: freedom and responsibility, which are exactly the largest bifurcations between naturalism and existentialism. We believe that Crane is by no means a pious disciple of naturalism. After further exploring the life and works of Crane, we find that he amazingly shares a lot with Jean-Paul Sartre. Based on this point, we decide to make an existential research on Stephen Crane’s life and works from an aspect different from naturalism.

Before we carry on the analysis of Crane’s life and works, this thesis at first provides a simple introduction of Sartre’s personal life, philosophical thoughts and literary works, with a hope to get a basic understanding of Sartre’s existentialism on the whole. It mainly emphasizes on several key theoretical notions like freedom, responsibility, situation, bad faith, otherness and so on, to facilitate the later concrete explorations. The analysis of Crane’s life mainly bases on the rebellions of his personal life and the uniqueness of his relationship between his life and works, thus to show us his understanding and cherishment of freedom and responsibility. As for the exploration of his works, it generally takes two steps. Firstly, it researches these key existential notions mentioned above in the four stories where existentialism is evident. They are The Red Badge of Courage, The Blue Hotel, The Open Boat, and The Monster. Secondly, it will analyze Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as a special case, which is the one with the most inconspicuous existential ideas in Crane’s works. Combining with feminism, this thesis believes that it is due to the pity and favor of the author toward the heroine that the topics of freedom and responsibility in the work become inconspicuous. Afterwards, it explores another existential theme: bad faith. Maggie shows the universality of existentialism in Crane’s works.

Through these analyses of Crane’s life and works, this research not only makes us obtain a deeper and more thorough understanding of Stephen Crane from another aspect, but also helps us to know more about ourselves and about others.

Key Words: Naturalism, Existentialism, Freedom, Responsibility, Bad faith, Othernes

III

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Chapter I Introduction

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a famous American naturalist at the end of the 19th century, while Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was the most influential French existentialist in the 20th century. Then the title of this thesis may seem to be strange. How can we use Sartre’s existentialism to analyze Stephen Crane’s life and works? The Americans were not familiar with existentialism until the middle of the 20th century. Crane probably even had not heard the word “existentialism” in his life. Nevertheless, this is the problem this thesis dedicates itself to dealing with.

Stephen Crane, mostly known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, has always been regarded as one of the forerunners of American naturalism. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was also rendered as a classic of naturalism. Some home scholars like Zou Zhiyong thought Maggie’s miserable fate completely resulted from such determining factors as heredity and environment[1] (Zou, 2000: 36). However, we find the determining forces in Crane’s works are not as overwhelming as in those pure naturalists’ writings. Instead we can catch the individual endeavors, usually effective ones, made by the characters of Crane, and the special concerns of the writer about the characters’ inner state of life. These were exactly the things rejected by the so-called pure naturalists like Amile Zola and Frank Norris.

Naturalism as a literary movement emerged in the late nineteenth-century France, which espoused the application of scientific principles to fictional works, was founded by Amile Zola. In his essay “The Experimental Novel”, Zola such concluded his experimental method, “In a word, we should operate on the characters, the passions, on the human and social data, in the same way that the chemist and the physicist operate on inanimate beings, and as the physiologist operate on living beings. Determinism dominates everything. It is scientific investigation, it is experimental reasoning, which combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists, and which replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment.”[2] (Zola, 1993: 298) With the aim to oppose the imagination and subjectivity of idealists and romanticists, naturalists managed to analyze human beings as if they were as objective as objects. As Zola said, “Determinism dominates everything.” Such things as environment, heredity and instincts were what naturalists highly strengthened. Here is a

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

precise description of the dramatis personae under the pens of naturalists.

The novelists’ portraiture of character became superficial; they painted types instead of individuals, and since psychology was reduced to physiology, they were apt to view merely the animality and the primitiveness of man. Man was devoid of a soul and of higher ethical motives; he was a helpless creature determined by heredity and environment. Consequently the characters were not ethically responsible for their actions, they were pawns driven by outer forces or inner urges; moral checks were always lacking. The principle of free will was denied and man was the victim of forces beyond his control.

[3]

(Ahnebrink,

1993: 3)

From the descriptions of Zola and Ahnebrink about naturalism and naturalists, we can get such a conclusion that the fate of the characters of naturalists were determined by uncontrollable forces and were thus deprived of free will and moral checks. However, the characters under Stephen Crane’s pen did not wholly coincide with the descriptions above. Although they were usually placed in some extreme milieu, such as cruel wars, horrible shipwreck, terrible life plight, they were not totally subject to the environment. Some of them even achieved success over environment. Meanwhile, the writer did not take all the ethical responsibility away from his characters either. In most cases, they made themselves winners or failures, heroes or cowards. They still held the basic right and obligation peculiar to human beings: freedom and responsibility, which is the exact focus of existentialism.

As a matter of fact, the foreign experts of naturalism had noticed that Stephen Crane was by no means a faithful disciple of Amile Zola. They thought American naturalism was a little bit off the track of the orthodox naturalism represented by Zola. Oscar Cargill such commented the American naturalism: “It is important to note that the leaders in the American Naturalistic School are by no means convinced Naturalists—they betray themselves by pet schemes for human betterment, schemes in which no genuine and thorough-going pessimist has any legitimate interest.”[4](Cargill, 1993: 362) Among this impure school of naturalism, Stephen Crane was even the one “whose debt to literary naturalism is small” [5] (Thorp, 1993: 369), compared to Frank Norris, another representative of American naturalism. In China, however, the research of Crane seemed to be much more superficial. Few people remember his name, and if they do, most of them only know he was a naturalist. Even some scholars said, “Stephen Crane was a pure naturalist.”[1](Zou, 2000: 37) Such an original genius as

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Stephen Crane should by no means be confined to only one single aspect. We often wonder why it was the undeveloped remote days that witnessed the most versatile talents like Leonardo da Vinci and Confucius. Maybe the answer is that originality connotes diversification.

To be gratified, there are still respectable critics, both home and abroad, having paid increasing attentions to his tendency of impressionism and modernism in form and technology. Both Sun Honghong [6] (2001) and Ren Yuhua [7] (2000) found that the application of a large number of color words in The Red Badge of Courage embodied impressionistic characteristics. Chen Fachun amply discussed Crane’s modernism in narrative skills. “By narrating from a center of consciousness, juxtaposing different points of view and tentative employment of the stream-of-consciousness technique, Crane was taking a step towards abandonment of the voice of authorial omniscience and towards containment of narrative within the minds of characters.”[8](Chen, 1999: 33) Chen also mentioned a little about Crane’s modernism in thoughts, about the loneliness and absurdness revealed in his works. In fact, these things about Crane's modern thoughts are to be explored carefully in this thesis, from the aspect of existentialism, mainly from Sartre’s existentialism.

Stephen Crane was born in 1871, the same year as Theodore Dreiser. Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost were all born during the following three years. Only Crane's amazing precocity made us think of him as belonging to the generation that preceded theirs. His products mainly included several novels, among which Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and The Red Badge of Courage were the most noted two; two poetry anthologies, The Black Riders and War Is Kind; and a large number of short stories, sketches and news reports, among which the most famous ones were The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Monster. These works have attracted much attention from different schools of literary criticism, including naturalism, impressionism and modernism as mentioned in the previous paragraphs. It seemed that his shortened 28-year life had been as complete and sparkling as anyone else's. Only a genius like him could have lived a life like his. Originality was the spring of his unusual talents. Since he acclaimed that he did not belong to any schools, we can say that he lived by chance in an age when naturalism prevailing and he foresaw the next century by his foreknowledge of modernism, impressionism and as we will stress in this thesis,

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

existentialism. He had also brought influence to some big figures like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Such a genius deserves more attention.

Crane was an innovative writer arising from life and existence. Around half a century later, a philosophical trend called “Existentialism” became pervasive all over the world. If Crane had not been dead at such an early age, how cheerful he would be at sight of the climate. His life was a legend and resembled Sartre's in many places. We can easily find such typical existential concerns about beings in Crane's writings, as freedom, responsibility, situation, abandonment, anguish, despair, otherness and bad faith. This thesis aims to seek the close connection between Stephen Crane and Jean-Paul Sartre. That is, to explore Crane's life and works in Sartre’s existentialism.

The second chapter is to introduce Sartre’s existentialism and the traits of his literature. This is the theoretical basis part of the later analysis about Stephen Crane. The variety of existentialism itself is very rich. There are two existential schools on the whole, the Christian one and the atheistic one. Even in the same school, the doctrine of each existentialist may be different. Therefore, here only Sartre's philosophy—one kind of atheistic existentialism is involved, since Sartre was the most influential and representative existentialist in the 20th century, and also an original genius basing his study on life and existence. The introduction will begin with the notion of freedom, for Sartre’s existentialism was famed as a philosophy of freedom. The other important concepts such as responsibility, bad faith, abandonment, despair, anguish, otherness, and committed literature, all owe much to freedom. He was not only a famous philosopher, but first of all an excellent writer. He was the only person who refused the Nobel Prize for literature in the Nobel history. His most famed literature form was his situation plays, many of which shared the same topics with Crane's works.

The third chapter is to scrutinize Crane's life and to seek his existential trend from his rebellions and uniqueness. He defied his religious family by being an atheist; he defied the New York police by testifying for a prostitute; he defied Victorian morality by living with a woman who owned a high-class brothel. He joined wars and thus could get closer and more direct to the society. He also owned a unique relationship with his works: he lived his life backwards, or rather he wrote it forwards. That was his unique “write-it-then-live-it” style. All his rebellions and uniqueness showed that Crane acted like an existential hero whose first

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concern was his total freedom and responsibility while conflicting with his surroundings.

The fourth chapter is to seek his existential tendency through analyzing five of his writings. They are Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (13), The Red Badge of Courage (15), The Open Boat (17), The Blue Hotel (18), and The Monster (19). The latter four stories will be first analyzed under those existential terms, while Maggie will be left to the last as a special case for its heavy color of naturalism. Although Crane did not so obviously place freedom as the theme of his works as Sartre had did in his plays of situation, such as in The Flies, we can still find these typical existential key words like responsibility, situation, abandonment, anguish, despair, otherness and bad faith well illustrated in these works. Sartre’s several situation plays will be used to facilitate the existential analysis. This part will be the main body of this thesis.

In the conclusion part, on the basis of the above analysis, this thesis will first review and sum up the common points between Stephen Crane and Jean-Paul Sartre. Then after touching on the sporadic existential ideas in The Analects of Confucius, it demonstrates the universality of existential concerns. The three of them, Sartre, Crane, or Confucius, were all great people who valued originality and were on the same road to seek the most effective and efficient way to make our limited life more significant, both to us and to others. Finally, it will talk about the academic and practical significances of this thesis.

This paper’s theoretical starting point is the gap between Stephen Crane’s naturalism and the orthodox naturalism: freedom and responsibility. Based on this important divergence, which is also the watershed between naturalism and existentialism, this thesis spreads the existential analysis of Stephen Crane’s life and his works. We thereby not only have studied Stephen Crane from another perspective comparatively thoroughly, but also have deepened our understanding of the states of human existences, both of ourselves’ and of others’.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

Chapter II Sartre and His Existentialism

The twentieth century was an eventful era, which witnessed two world wars and numerous other revolts for the sake of emancipation and freedom. Undoubtedly, Jean-Paul Sartre was an outstanding representative of such a century. As a worldwide well-known philosopher, novelist, playwright, critic, biographer and politico, Sartre set a perfect example of a free man for the whole world. Born in Paris, 1905, Sartre grew up in a relatively loose environment on account of his father’s early death. It was due to his particular childhood life without the castration of a father that Sartre could live a life treasuring freedom so much. His existential philosophy and literature were based on the notion of freedom, so were his legendary private and political life.

Sartre never got married officially, but kept a lifetime soul marriage with Simone de Beauvoir, who was an almost equally famous existentialist and a feminist. Meanwhile, they allowed each other to have affairs with other people. Their love was a miracle even in the whole history of human beings. Sartre didn’t want to be confined in the trap of traditional marriage. He would not like to give up any form of freedom. In 19, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but he immediately declined it. He was afraid of being restricted by any official forces. He just wanted to be a free man. Though never being a member of any governments, Sartre responded and backed all righteous struggles or even revolts, including those of France, Algeria, Cuba, China, and Vietnam. He encouraged all the people to strive for freedom, which he thought was the most basic right to human existences.

Sartre’ distinctive and noticeable life well matched his world fame in philosophy and literature. As a matter of fact, his life was his philosophy in a sense. In the following two sections, a general introduction of Sartre’s philosophy and literature will be respectively provided.

2.1 Sartre’s Philosophy

On the whole, Sartre’s philosophy system was integral on one hand, and fluctuant on the other hand. He spent his lifetime to build up his doctrine, which was then entitled as “existentialism” by his contemporaries. However, his early thoughts and his late thoughts

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were criticized as contradictory. Although the emphasis of Sartre’s thoughts varied along with his life experiences, the center of his philosophy stayed the same throughout his life. That was the freedom of human beings. Some critics classified Sartre’s development of thoughts into three stages: the early stage, the middle stage and the late stage. [9] (Liu, 2006: 49) On the first phrase, symbolized by Nausea (1938), Sartre focused on the freedom of “lonely men”, while on the third stage, marked by Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he emphasized to interfere the society and to strive for the freedom of most people. The second stage, represented by Being and Nothingness (1943), was the one when Sartre’s theory became mature and systemized. Due to the limited space, this thesis will only focus on this transitional period, greedily hoping to get across Sartre’s whole spirit of existentialism. It ranged from the whole 1940s to the early 1950s.

Most people may first get to know about Sartre’s existentialism through his pamphlet Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), which was given as a speech by Sartre to refute against various reproaches. However, he had already put his main basic thoughts about human existence into his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness (1943). In the following part, this paper will mainly based on these two works to give a rough introduction to Sartre’s existentialism, as implied above, a theory of freedom.

Although there were different brands of existentialism, all existentialists shared one basic tenet, “existence precedes essence” [10] (Sartre, 1946: 3), which means that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 3) Here “existence” referred to the existence of human beings. They believed the essence of human beings could only be obtained by their own choices and actions. This slogan suggested that existentialism was an active and optimistic school, which encouraged people to make their own life by efforts. In this sense, the atheistic existentialism was a more thorough existentialism compared to the Christian one. Sartre once quoted one sentence of Dostoevsky in Existentialism Is a Humanism, “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted” [10] (Sartre, 1946: 6), and thought that was the starting point of existentialism. What he highlighted here was the absolute freedom of individuals. So we might as well look back the ontological bases of freedom.

Sartre divided the whole world into two parts: being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

Being-in-itself is what it is, or those objective things that are “absolutely independent of our point of view” [11] (Spade, 1995: 72), while being-for-itself is not what it is, and what it is not, referring to the subjective “consciousness” [11] (Spade, 1995: 72), which was here used to do for human beings by Sartre. The being-in-itself owns three characteristics, “Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”[12](Sartre, 1943: lxvi) They respectively imply that being-in-itself is contingent and has no explanation; being-in-itself is self-contained and has no cause; and being-in-itself is solid and positive.[11](Spade, 1995: 73-76) Comparatively, being-for-itself is not in itself but depends on being-in-itself; being-for-itself is contingent and has no explanation; being-for-itself is not what it is, and is what it is not.[11](Spade, 1995: 80-83) As Sartre said, “the object must be distinguished from consciousness not by its presence but by its absence, not by its plenitude, but by its nothingness.”[12](Sartre, 1943: lx) It is this “nothingness” of being-for-itself that endows us with the possibility to deny the being-in-itself, and thus to gain the freedom. These two differences between the being-in-itself (the object) and the being-for-itself (the consciousness) are also the reasons why to the former, its essence precedes its existence; while to the latter, its existence precedes its essence.

All of us, the “being-for-itself”, are combinations of facticity and transcendence. In other words, all of us own two sides: our context and our freedom. The facticity or context was “fixed and definite, immovable and solid, it smacks of the in-itself.”[11](Spade, 1995: 173) However, the facticity could by no means be the in-itself (being-in-itself). Nobody could be both a being-for-itself and a being-in-itself, except for God. As Sartre proved, God could not co-exist with human’s freedom, because if God existed, he would have determined the essence of man in advance, and he would have left no room for man’s freedom. So we declared God’s death and claimed the absolute freedom of each individual. Virtually, the nothingness of the being-for-itself we have just mentioned in the last paragraph originates from transcendence. Therefore, it’s safe to say that transcendence is the origin of nothingness and thus the origin of freedom. Meanwhile we have to be responsible for our facticity. As Sartre said, “man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 6) Here comes out the main topic of

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Sartre’s existentialism: freedom. “What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment …” [10] (Sartre, 1946: 11)

However, “‘To be free’ does not mean ‘to obtain what one has wished’, but rather ‘by oneself to determine oneself to wish’.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 483) That’s to say, freedom is only the freedom of choosing, but not that of obtaining. So here Sartre defined freedom as “the autonomy of choice” [12] (Sartre, 1943: 483). Since we have made clear about the origin and the definition of freedom in the sense of Sartre’s existentialism, we can further discuss several other important notions of this doctrine, such as situation, responsibility, anguish, abandonment, despair, bad faith, and the relationship between my freedom and others’ freedom, or otherness.

As Sartre observed, “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 4) The situation is “the common product of the contingency of the in-itself and of freedom.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 488) The “fact of not being able not to be free is the facticity of freedom and the fact of not being able not to exist is its contingency.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 486) In fact, “contingency and facticity are really one.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 486) Concretely speaking, such things as the place, the past, the environment, the death, and the relationship with others, are all that we have called the facticity of freedom, or “the given which it has to be and which it illuminates by its project.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 4) “The situation exists only in correlation with the surpassing of the given toward an end.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 8) Sartre was quite famous for his so-called “plays of situation”, where the characters were usually placed in extreme situations thus the most fundamental human realities were easier to put up. In severe situations we can also see more clearly the importance of freedom.

Responsibility is the natural and logical consequence of freedom. “This responsibility is not a question of having to answer to some absolute moral standards. Rather the point is that if you don’t like the outcome of your choices, if you don’t like who you turn out to be, you have no one to blame but yourself.”[11](Spade, 1995: 20) The “man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 553) Thus there will be no excuse any more. “I am condemned to be wholly responsible for myself.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 556) Due to

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

this inescapable responsibility, freedom becomes not as sweet as it sounds any longer. The absolute freedom and responsibility will definitely bring us into such frustrating things as abandonment, anguish, and despair.

This “anguish” exactly originates from the free commitment of man, for man cannot escape from the sense of being completely and profoundly responsible for what he chose of his own free will. If we make it clearer, the anguish of choosing actually does not come from choosing itself, but results from the consequences of choosing. And since we are absolutely free and are forced to bear the whole responsibility for ourselves, and even as Sartre strengthened, for all the human beings, we cannot find anything else to depend upon either within or outside ourselves—no God, no determinism, and no human nature. It seems that “we are left alone, without excuse.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 6) This is the “abandonment” in the sense of existentialists. “I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibility.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 555-556) As for “despair”, it merely means “we limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the possibilities which render our action feasible.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 8) In fact, here “despair” is from a practical sense to warn us not to be trapped in illusion. Because every man is free, and there is no human nature that we could take as foundational, we must confine ourselves to what we could see. The following paragraph is a short conclusion about the correlations among freedom, responsibility, anguish, abandonment and bad faith.

The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse; he is no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides in this very revelation. But as we pointed out at the beginning of this work, most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith.

[12]

(Sartre, 1943: 556)

Bad faith, or self-deception, is a lie to oneself literally. “To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as a truth a pleasing untruth.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 49) Bad faith originates from the nothingness of human beings, of

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being-for-itself, since it is not what it is, but what it is not, and the combination of facticity and transcendence. There are two basic instruments of judging bad faith. One is “transcendence–facticity”, the other is “being-for-itself–being-for-others”. In the first case, if we cannot well balance our facticity and transcendence, whether denying transcendence and emphasizing facticity, or doing it the other way around, we will respectively fall into two patterns of bad faith. If people are scared by the freedom accompanied by responsibility, they may choose to escape the transcendence and fall into the first pattern of bad faith: denying transcendence and emphasizing facticity; if people don’t like to face up the unpleasant, disagreeable and unchangeable facts of themselves, they may prefer to face up the horrors of freedom and thus fall into the second pattern of bad faith: denying facticity and emphasizing transcendence.

In the second case, being-for-itself and being-for-others are the two aspects of my being, respectively referring to the opinions of my own to myself and that of others to me. There are also two types of self-deception according to this instrument. “The equal dignity of being, possessed by my being-for-others and by my being-for-myself permits a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and from the for-others to the for-itself.”[12](Sartre, 1943: 58) So we can define these two patterns of bad faith as: denying the being-for-itself and emphasizing the being-for-others, and denying the being-for-others and emphasizing the being-for-itself.

In fact, we can emerge the two instruments of judging bad faith into one. When people tend to deny the being-for-itself and emphasize the being-for-others, they are actually denying transcendence and emphasizing facticity; and when people tend to deny the being-for-others and emphasize the being-for-itself, they are virtually denying facticity and emphasizing transcendence. According to Sartre, we cannot tell exactly who we are ourselves, but only others can judge us objectively. [10](Sartre, 1946: 11) Then when we distinguish being-for-itself and being-for-others, we can roughly refer them respectively to transcendence and facticity.

Since the being-for-others is a part of my being, it implies that the existence of others is indispensable to my existence. Then how to cope with the conflict between my freedom and others’ freedom? Everyone’s freedom is equal and we cannot only highlight the freedom of

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

ourselves. Sartre regarded the existence of others as one aspect of one’s facticity: we cannot change it, but we can choose the attitudes towards it, meanwhile we are responsible for it. If we cannot properly deal with the relationship with others, we may fall into a bitter situation. As Sartre pointed out in No Exit, “Hell is other people.”[13](Sartre, 1944: 28)

Sartre’s doctrine basically discussed the concerns about the existence of human beings. He pursued freedom all through his life, and built up a philosophical system which has been guiding us how to envisage the problem of our life and how to live an active and optimistic life under the precondition of freedom. Since man chooses freedom, he is in one sense abandoned by God and the corresponding values or standards. He has to be thus responsible for all of his free choices. This kind of freedom accompanied by responsibility sometimes is horrible for it could push man into the abyss of anguish and despair. In order to escape this kind of agony, man usually chooses to hide in bad faith. Above all, man cannot ignore that freedom is always freedom in situation. There is freedom of mine, but also freedom of others. The existence of others is also one kind of situation of my freedom. Situation is indispensable to my existence. However, man still owns the freedom about how to deal with his situation. The fact that Sartre’s existentialism is a theory of freedom determines that existentialism “is a doctrine of action” [10] (Sartre, 1946: 15), since “existence precedes essence” [10] (Sartre, 1946: 1). Man could thus only change his situations through his own actions. As Sartre strengthened, “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 3)

Sartre himself not only made his life through his political actions or other practical personal behaviors, but also through his writings, both philosophical ones and literary ones. In the following section, this paper will take a look at the traits of Sartre’s plays of situation and see how his literature works reflect his philosophical thoughts.

2.2 The Traits of Sartre’s Plays of Situation

During the period of the systemization of his existentialism, the philosopher Sartre produced a series of plays to facilitate the understanding of his theories. These plays were the so-called “plays of situation”, mainly including The Flies (1943), No Exit (1944), Death Without Burial (1946), The Respectable Prostitute (1946), The Dirty Hands (1948), and The Devil and the Good Lord (1951). In these plays, the playwright was at first inclined to place

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the characters in an extreme situation, which was full of crises and plights, and then forced them to make choices and be responsible for their actions. The point was to demonstrate the bitter courses of making choices and to feature the conflict between characters' actions and the situations. Now let’s have a look at the various situations of these plays.

In The Flies, Orestes was the hero who realized the existence of human’s freedom and fully exerted it. Meanwhile, he unhesitatingly bore the corresponding responsibility, though heavy and painful. We can say The Flies is a tragedy of freedom. So is No Exit, from the opposite angle. The three dead persons in the hell were actually not in the hell physically, but they mentally did be. They could not make or change their life any more. They were done. What’s more, they tortured each other and constructed the hell in the real sense: Hell is other people. The situation in Death Without Burial might be the most severe and practical one. Under different cruel torture of the fascists, the five guerrillas still maintained the freedom to choose: to give in or to stand up. They paid heavily for their choices. The Respectable Prostitute touched several subtle social problems of the time: racialism, class-consciousness, and so on. The Dirty Hands told a story happening in a political arena. Although the hero finally realized the gap between his political dream and the reality, he still chose to insist on his ideal thoughts even at the cost of his life. The Devil and the Good Lord, Sartre’s favorite among his plays, further strengthened the point that freedom should be the freedom in situation. The hero Geotz attempted to be absolutely evil or absolutely good, that is, to be the Devil or the Good Lord. But he failed. Finally he had to take the concrete situation into consideration and compromised.

From these plays we can approach such a conclusion about the traits of Sartre’s plays of situation: firstly, they all emphasized on the characters’ freedom in concrete and, usually severe situations; secondly, they all strengthened the responsibility accompanied by freedom; thirdly, they all belonged to a kind of “committed literature”. Since in the earlier part we have talked about situation and responsibility already, here it will mainly discuss the third trait of Sartre’s situation plays: committed literature.

Committed literature was firstly put forward in 1947 as an opposition against the slogan “art for art’s sake” in Sartre’s famous literature criticism masterpiece: What Is Literature? In that book, Sartre raised three questions which were unavoidable for all men of letters: What

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

does one write? Why write? For whom does one write? His answers were: writing the present, but not other times; writing for today, but not for any other times; writing for the sake of the public, but not only for oneself.[14](Levy, 2005: 103-111)

To Sartre, literature was not only for enjoying, but also for thinking. The following is a paragraph out from What Is Literature?

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality...one makes oneself an accomplice to the enemy, that is, of propaganda. I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence...

[15]

(Vyes, 2006: 2)

In Sartre’s opinion, writing was a certain way of demanding freedom. He believed that the fulfillment of any writings needed the cooperation of the authors and the readers. He hoped his writings could arouse some changes in the readers of his time. This sort of pragmatic opinion about writing echoed Sartre’s concerns conveyed in his philosophy and real life, of the improvement of human beings’ conditions.

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Chapter III Existential Ideas in Crane’s Life

During Stephen Crane’s lifetime, his personal life was as noticeable, if not more than, as his achievements in his career. His distinctiveness was mostly reflected in the following three aspects: his rebellion against his religious family, his struggle against the social prejudice of street girls, and his unique relations with his works. It was this distinctiveness that mirrored Crane’s consistent pursuing of freedom and a real life of himself.

3.1 Rebellious Personal Life

Stephen Crane was the fourteenth child of a prominent Methodist preacher and a founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. His mother’s father and three uncles were all ministers, and his father as well as his two uncles in his mother’s side was also a religious man. However, “the children of ministers have a reputation for rebelliousness, and Crane in his stoical and tight-lipped way was no exception.”[16](Crane, 1983: viii) Exactly as Benfey said, his parents were “enlisted to define a conveniently narrow world for Crane to ‘rebel against’” [17] (Benfey, 1992: 21).

Stephen’s father, J.T. Crane was a strict clergyman. He strongly promoted temperance and opposed dancing and the reading of fiction. He claimed he had never smoked a cigarette. In “An Essay on Dancing”, published in 1849, he “established that dancing had declined in grace and morality since biblical times:

Our dances are performed by males and females mingled together and arranged in pairs; that of the [ancient] Hebrews was performed by a band of maidens and women alone. The modern dance is regulated by the senseless whine of a violin, while that of the Hebrews was accompanied by a noble anthem of praise.

[17]

(Benfey, 1992: 26)

We can see how pious and solemn Crane’s father was, and his mother M. Helen Crane,

was no less zealous to religion than her husband, especially in the promotion of temperance. She was one of the leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which aimed to protect women from the dangers posed by the drunken behavior of men. Mrs. Crane even made up with her own approach to the problem of alcohol abuse. That was to emphasize on the effects of alcohol on the body. In her late years, she was even crazier about temperance:

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

she attributed labor strikes to liquor. “The drinking habits of the working classes were largely if not entirely the cause of the distress among them.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 37)

Stephen Crane successfully ran away from his ministerial destiny. He sprinted in the opposite direction. He believed no God, heavily smoked and recklessly drank. He had dreamed of becoming a soldier from childhood. Several years after his father’s death, Crane transferred from the Pennington Seminary, a school created and developed by his father, to Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, a leisurely and co-educational military academy. And “Crane called his two years there ‘the happiest period of my life’” [17] (Benfey, 1992: 47). Afterwards he entered a civilian college, Lafayette College, where he only stayed one semester, because he failed five of his seven lessons. Crane’s last period of formal education was spent in Syracuse as a special student, for his granduncle was one of the founders of the college. However, he soon quitted there. The dull and restrained classes didn’t appeal to him. He preferred to playing baseball or “studying faces in the streets” [17] (Benfey, 1992: 51). Humanity was a much more interesting subject to Crane. Although he could not become a real solder, he lived a life as that of a fearless fighter. He put up a vivid image of bold, sardonic, reckless and adventurous hard man in his eight-year social life.

If in the early social years Crane was not able to fully experience an ideal life, he had already carefully imagined it in his fictional world. He had finished his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 11, before he acquainted a real prostitute in 16. His representative work, The Red Badge of Courage, was also accomplished in 15, much earlier before he saw a real battle in 17. Crane’s many other works were composed under such a bold imagination. This point will be further explained in the following part: 3.2 Unique Relationship with Works.

Furthermore, Crane soon developed his famous irony style. He found a powerful and efficient weapon for attacking and defending. In all his writings—not only novels, short stories, but even poems, we can always hear the voice of an active fighter. He had made full preparation before he was really involved in the social conflicts.

In 16, Crane caused a scandal by testifying for a street girl named Dora, and thus defied the New York police. He was convinced that “a wrong done to a prostitute must be as purely a wrong as a wrong done to a queen.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 176) The wrath of the corrupt

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police was then shifted from the girl to Crane. He was not arrested, but three months later, he left New York for Cuba as a war correspondent.

During his trip to Cuba, two significant things occurred in Crane’s short life. One was the acquaintance with Cora Taylor, who stayed with Crane like his wife until his life came to a close. The other was the shipwreck of the Commodore that Crane boarded, which delayed his join in war, but provided him with perfect material for his best story The Open Boat. It seemed that the first thing had brought more changes to Crane. The point was that Cora Taylor was not a common woman, but the owner of a high-class brothel, and six years elder than Crane. They just lived together as wife and husband, no wedding in any churches (Crane even did not admit the existence of a God), and no explanation to any rumors pervading. Maybe indifference was really the best way to kill rumors. Their unconventional combination reminds us of the subtle relation between the most famous existential couple Sartre and Beauvoir. They also never got married, but kept a lifelong-term companionship. Crane was just like an existential hero who lived his own life recklessly. No one had the right to usurp his freedom to choose, as long as he determined to bear the whole responsibilities for his choices.

Just two months after he narrowly escaped from the horrified shipwreck, Crane plunged into another war, the Greco-Turkish War. Although he was badly sick when in Athens, he still faithfully put down what he saw in a real war.” The real product of war was the mutilation of human bodies.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 209) Thirteen months later, in the spring of 18, Crane returned to the battlefield of Cuba, for the sake of the Spanish-American War this time. If Crane saw the real face of war for the first time in Greece, in Cuba he knew about the real soldiers the first time. His health condition was worse, but he was more enthusiastic to his work. He understood that what he shouldered was not only the responsibility for himself, but also the responsibility for the whole human beings. Crane's reports of wars completely accorded with Sartre's advocacy about “committed literature”, which was to influence the social reality by means of writing. In fact, not only his news covering about wars was a kind of committed literature, but also all of his other writings that reflected different social problems, like the slums, the race, and the west.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

3.2 Unique Relationship between Crane’s Life and Works

Christopher Benfey published in 1992 a book entitled The Double Life of Stephen Crane, exploring the unique relationship between Crane’s life and writings. Benfey endeavored to prove that Crane “tried to live what he’s already written”, “Crane lived his life backwards, or rather he wrote it forwards.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 5) Benfey’s explorations were so careful and meticulous that some of them even seemed far-fetched. If only for proving, three sufficed, which were related with three important topics in Crane’s life: women, war, and wreckage, or respectively connected with Crane’s three important works, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Open Boat.

Maggie was a story about the fall of an innocent slum girl into prostitution and suicide, written in 11. It was usually regarded as the result of Crane’s experimental life in the slums of New York. However, Benfey found some scrappy evidence to prove that “some version of Maggie was written before Crane arrived in New York.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 63) Moreover, after analyzing the text itself, Benfey reached such a conclusion, “what urban texture the novel manages to muster is borrowed from Riis and from Methodist tracts about the evils of the modern city. The rest of the novel, and the best of it, is all hypothesis, speculation, dream.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 63) What we can directly get from the text is that it’s rare for a male writer who intended to fairly treat female, especially these despised low-class women like prostitutes, although in effect he failed. On one hand, Crane paid great sympathies to these unfortunate women who were oppressed by men and society, like Maggie and the girl abandoned by Maggie’s brother Jimmie. On the other hand, he pointed out their weaknesses in his sharp pen, but finally forgave them merely for the reason that they were weak, pretty and obedient women. This point will be further discussed in the next chapter. Now comes the most interesting part. After several years of experiments in New York City, in 16, Crane really met a group of prostitutes, among whom one was called Dora Clark. He offended the local police by defending her in court against the accusing of a corrupted office. He showed his friendliness and sympathies to these real “Maggies”. Later in the same year, he found a transcended “Maggie” in real life: Cora Taylor, the owner of a high-class brothel, but living a confident and bohemian life. This is the first case of Crane’s “write-it-then-live-it” process.

The second case, also the most well known one, should start from Crane’s best work, The

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Red Badge of Courage. It was set in the American Civil War, mainly about the psychological development of a young soldier called Henry Fleming. When Crane wrote the story, all his experiences about conflicts only came from baseball and football. The exquisite portrait of Fleming’s inner movement made the novel read so real that it even fooled the civil war veterans. “At least one veteran claimed, ‘I was with Crane at Antietam.’”[17](Benfey, 1992: 3) Crane was so eager to see “whether The Red Badge of Courage was accurate” [17] (Benfey, 1992: 5), that he grasped every opportunity to approach the battlefields. He became a war correspondent in Cuba and Greece despite his badly ill health. The result of checking was both satisfying and disappointed, because the real war was exactly as cruel and insignificant as portrayed in The Red Badge. “The real product of war was the mutilation of human bodies.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 209) The war experiences accelerated Crane’s death. Only half and a year after he returned from Cuba in 18, Crane died, at the age of 28. It cost him too much to commit to his earlier writing.

The third case, various from the previous two, ended with the work The Open Boat, which was one of Crane’s most popular short stories. The Open Boat was composed soon after Crane’s narrow escape from a real shipwreck. “Shipwrecks,” he wrote in the story, “are apropos of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 107) The fact was that Crane finally outlived the severe shipwreck. In some ways Crane did train himself for the sinking of the Commodore. “For Crane, the Commodore disaster was merely the culminating episode in a lifelong involvement with shipwrecks, actual and metaphorical.”[17](Benfey, 1992: 183) When he was a journalist at his early twenties, Crane wrote about shipwrecks on the Jersey shore. Maybe it was a little far-fetched to say this kind of training saved his life, but it really helped him develop techniques of style and emphasis, thus facilitating the drafting of The Open Boat.

To some extent, we all try to live our fantasies. Writings are in fact the dreams of writers, according to Sigmund Freud. Nevertheless, the extremity of Crane’s “write-it-then-live-it” procedures deserves special attention. To sum up, it could attribute to three things.

The first one was the influence of his growing surroundings. This was probably the most notable connection between Crane and his family. As we know, Crane’s parents were both

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

writers, though religious ones. From a very early age, Crane had realized the power of written words, which afterwards became almost his best friend and occupied a great part of his life. Then it was not hard to understand his priority to words, rather than reality.

The second one was his deliberately choosing of a bohemian life. He was indulged in the freedom of breaking conventions and confinement, and the excitement of risking and challenging. He enjoyed to “write-it-then-live-it”, to be different. It seemed that Crane had realized he did not have enough time to wait for every thing to happen in reality. Instead, he imagined them first, and felt them afterwards if allowed.

The third one was his respect of reality. It was not contradictory to say that Crane was a sincere man who grabbed every chance to feel the world. After he created a literary and imaginary world, he managed to examine the reality of it. He wanted his imagination to at least seem as true as facts. And he made it. He was responsible to his enjoyment of free choosing, even at the cost of his own life.

Crane was always doing what he willed. Just as Sartre said, “man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 3) Crane did not as supposed become a religious man, instead he kept far away from God and created a life of his own with a bang. Even his way of composing was so particular. Maybe someone would say Crane was too reckless and self-willed, because he dropped from college, defied the police for the sake of a street girl, fell in love with the owner of a high-class brothel, and disregarded his terrible health so as to die at that an early age. But what’s the problem? He acted like a free soldier, as he always desired to be, and daringly shouldered all the responsibilities for his actions. His distinctive existential life predicted a dense air of existentialism in his writings. In the following chapter, this thesis will analyze several of his works in Sartre’s existentialism.

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Chapter IV Existential Ideas in Crane's Works

In his short 28-year life, Crane had not left us a short list of writings. Among his several novels, two poem collections, and a large number of short stories and news reports, we choose five pieces as the material of our analysis of his existential orientation. They are two famed novels: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (13), The Red Badge of Courage (15), and three famous short stories: The Open Boat (17), The Blue Hotel (18), and The Monster (19).

As we have strengthened in Chapter II, Sartre’s existentialism was a philosophy of freedom. Centering on freedom, we have already introduced the notions of situation, responsibility, abandonment, despair, anguish, bad faith and otherness in the first part of Chapter II, and the concept of committed literature in the second part. Unlike Sartre, who deliberately chose to apply literature writings to further interpret his philosophical ideas, Crane unconsciously expressed these existential concepts through his special concerns about the inner state of his characters. It is our job to find them out and to classify. So now we will have a look at how these existential ideas live in Crane’s works.

4.1 Situations and Committed Literature

Stephen Crane was not only a writer, but also a journalist. The career as a reporter not only facilitated the collection of material for his story writing, but also helped him develop a realistic and pragmatic style in his writings. If he had been asked the three questions in What Is Literature: what does one write, why write, for whom does one write, his answers might have been the same as Sartre’s: writing the present, but not other times; writing for today, but not for any other times; writing for the sake of most people. Before we further talk over the topic of “committed literature”, we’d better at first get to know about the situations of the five stories mentioned above.

Maggie faithfully revealed the life of the then New York slums, although as we said in Chapter III, Maggie might have been completed before the author saw the real New York. The environment in which Maggie lived was the last place a lady would like to choose to be born. Maggie was the poor girl with a lady dream. The author did not directly paint a lot about the dirty, poor and messy living conditions of the tenement. Instead, he focused on the inner

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

world of them. The people around Maggie were the big obstacles in the way to realize her dream. They were mean, selfish, callous, and insensible. She had to make decisions in such an adverse situation. Crane not only called for attention to the improvement of the living conditions of the slums, but also appealed to pay more attention to the curing of these kinds of spirits, which were definitely not merely in slums.

The Red Badge of Courage was set in the civil war. Similar to Maggie, in this novel the emphasis of the author was not on the intense battle scenes or daring battle heroes, but on the psychological movement of the young soldier Henry Fleming. Crane placed his protagonist in cruel and callous battles, with an attempt to unveil the true face of war. The war was not only home to heroes and badges, but also to cowards (much more than heroes) and dead bodies. Furthermore, the existence of the war itself was ridiculous and insignificant. The Red Badge of Courage was in essence a great book against war.

The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel were respectively set in the broad sea and the mysterious American West. The first story was based on the experience of the writer himself. Most of it was the reappearance of reality. The second one was a story responsive to the then American westward expanding. Through the portraits of the inner world of the characters, we knew better how the events went on.

The Monster was a story occurring in a small town called Whilomville. Although it mainly discussed the subject of responsibility, another important theme of it was the racial problem. Maybe the focal point of the contradiction between Dr. Trescott and his town people was not whether he should take care of his benefactor, but rather whether he should look after the black horseman.

As we see, all the leading characters of Stephen Crane were placed in extreme situations. They were expected to make different choices, different actions, and then their different life in different situations. We can say, all the five stories above belonged to committed literature. Although the events in The Red Badge of Courage did not actually happened in Crane’s time, his focus was not the event itself, but the inner movement of the main character. He wrote it for the readers of his time. Crane’s writings usually stressed the personal inner world of his roles, as presented in the following parts. However, the situations of his stories could often lead the readers to think over some social issues in reality. Crane’s deep concerns over slum

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life, wars, westward expanding and racial problem amply showed us his acclamation of committed literature. As a journalist-writer, he really hoped his writings could be read by all the people of his time and could bring some changes to them. In other words, Crane was glad to invite his readers to co-produce his works. By means of writing, Crane influenced the world.

4.2 Abandonment and Despair in The Open Boat

I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibility.

[12]

(Sartre, 1943: 555-556)

This interpretation about “abandonment” of Sartre is quoted here for the second time not only to highlight the meaning of “abandonment” in Sartre’s sense, but also to stress the coincidence with the analysis of The Open Boat. The four men, the cook, the oiler, the correspondent and the captain, were really in a little boat “floating on the water”, “abandoned and passive in a hostile universe”.

At the beginning, although struggling with the billowy and boundless ocean, tortured by deadly coldness, hunger, fatigue, and sleepiness, the four men in the boat still held a slight of hope for somebody to rescue them. At first they looked forward to get help from a lighthouse, but only to be disappointed for it was deserted. Then they began to complain about “fate” and got angry at it. “If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd…” [18](Crane, 1969: 173) Maybe it was these descriptions about nature or fate that caused people to brand the author Stephen Crane a “naturalist”. Absolutely, there were many other places in The Open Boat conveying the similar complaints about the indifference and callousness of nature or fate.

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. … A high cold star in a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 180)

This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 183)

No matter how, the guys in the dingy finally realized the fact, although step by step, that they were abandoned by the so-called gods, fate or nature. A true naturalist would then let his characters forever live in the misery of abandonment, or more exactly, live in a miserable life totally arranged by fate. But, this was not what Stephen Crane did. Although the four men were disappointed again and again: the deserted lighthouse, the man on the land who they saw but didn’t see them, three of them finally survived from the shipwreck, and also from abandonment and despair through their own efforts. The lighthouse, the man on the faraway land or indifferent nature, were all intangible and without the control of the men in the little boat. All of these things pushed them into despair and back to the more tangible and governable people and things.

Since abandoned by nature, or by God, they turned back to themselves. “Then, if there be

no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: ‘Yes, but I love myself.’”[18](Crane, 1969: 180) Then came out the notion of “abandonment” in terms of Sartre: left alone and thrown into freedom and responsibility. They realized it was useless to blame and complain the indifference and ruthlessness of nature. The only way left to save their life was to depend on themselves, and only they could be responsible for their own choices and actions. As Sartre said, “the destiny of man is placed within himself”, “there is no hope except in his action”.[10](Sartre, 1946: 10) Through individual efforts and teamwork, they successfully saved themselves, except the oiler who unfortunately failed at the last step of the self-saving. As regards the teamwork or the comradeship among the four men, this thesis will further make some explanations in “4.4 The Otherness”.

In that an extreme situation, the four men also began to recognize the importance of the interior matters, which had been seldom mentioned at usual times.

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It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction, or at a tea.

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 183)

In essence, abandonment is not as dreadful as it appears. It could bring people from the concerns of the exterior back to those of the interior, from the intangible back to the governable. It helped to draw the four men from the illusion to the nature down to the despair in reality. In this sense, as Sartre said, existentialism was not a pessimistic doctrine, but an optimistic one. It forced and encouraged people to take concrete actions, which were obviously much more effective and practical than complaints or fantasies.

The four men in The Open Boat not only fully exerted their personal initiative in the rigorous confrontation with nature, but also developed a kind of brotherhood and cooperation. Each of them had done their endeavor, and had done whatever they could do for others in that a situation. They together proved to the nature that human beings could do well by depending on themselves even under the condition that the nature was indifferent. The brotherhood will be further discussed in “4.4 Otherness” as a different type from the one in The Blue Hotel. It was through this authentic story, The Open Boat, which Crane disclosed the mental journey of his characters, and as likely as not, of his own, from naturalism to existentialism.

4.3 Anguish of Freedom and Responsibility in The Monster

The Monster (19) was one of the best-known stories of Stephen Crane. In brief, it was about the conflicting attitudes between Dr. Trescott and his town people toward the black coachman Henry Johnson after he literally lost his face and was branded a \"monster\". Dr. Trescott persisted in his responsibility to save Henry’s life and to take care of his life afterward, since his face was burned off owing to rescuing his son Jimmie from a severe fire. However, the town people were scared almost to death by Henry’s disfiguration, and strongly opposed Henry Johnson to live in the town. The author Crane not only touched the sensitive racial topic in this novella, but also and mainly exposed the topic of anguish resulting from freedom and responsibility. Here “responsibility” is not only the moral duty as Dr Trescott

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

committed to Henry Johnson, but also the obligation on an existential level: being responsible for one’s free choices. Crane displayed three layers of state of responsibility, respectively referring to three types of characters.

The characters in the first layer of responsibility were those with no sympathy and understanding but only with fear and nausea toward Henry’s losing face, such as the little boy Jimmie, and most of the Whilomville town people. At the beginning of the story, Jimmie had been hesitated to bear the responsibility for his mistakes. From Jimmie we know how people usually elude the anguish of this responsibility: they appease themselves from others’ sin. This kind of people even did not realize the necessity of shouldering responsibility. Jimmie never held appreciation to Henry, his previous close friend and lifesaver. Instead, he made fun of him as a “monster” by playing games with his little companions. Although he was only a little child, he represented a majority of people in the town. This group of people thought Dr. Trescott should even let Henry die after the fire. They deemed it was not worthy for Dr. Trescott to ruin himself and fall “from being the leading doctor in town to about the last one”

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 115). They did not even recognize the inevitability and anguish of

responsibility.

Those lying in the second layer of responsibility were the ones who claimed to be heroes of freedom and responsibility, but finally failed to be. The barber Reifsnyder and the single woman Martha Goodwin were the representatives. The author inserting the two apparently irrelevant roles was actually giving hints to us that to be totally responsible for one’s choice was quite difficult. Reifsnyder at first defended for Dr. Trescott’s actions in the discussion with his customers. “‘Let him die?’ he demanded, ‘How vas that? How can you let a man die?’”[18](Crane, 1969: 94) However, after he made clear what it meant to be without face, he gave up his previous insistence. “’No, but look,’ said Reifsnyder; ‘supposing you don’t got a face!’”[18](Crane, 1969: 95) As regards the single woman Martha, Crane even gave her much satire about her fakery. She was introduced as “a woman of great mind” [18] (Crane, 1969: 103). “And Martha walked her kitchen with a stern brow, an invincible being like Napoleon.”[18](Crane, 1969: 103) When she first heard about the chaos of the town caused by Henry Johnson, she despised the so-called “whole town”. The followings are the conversations between Martha and her two admirers.

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“Oh, I don’t care what everybody says,” said Martha.

“Well, you can’t go against the whole town,” answered Carrie, in sudden sharp defiance. “No, Martha, you can’t go against the whole town,” piped Kate, following her leader rapidly.

“‘The whole town,’” cried Martha, “I’d like to know what you call ‘the whole town.’ Do you call these silly people who are scared of Henry Johnson ‘the whole town’?”

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 113)

If the story stopped here, we might have regarded Martha as a real heroine of existentialism: exercising her freedom and keeping her subjectivity. But only when she knew the Hanigans was moving away from the town due to the existence of Henry Johnson, she behaved the same as Carrie and Kate. She failed to be responsible for her choice. She realized the anguish of responsibility, so she unloaded it. We can see the power of Crane’s irony in these two roles through the up-then-down tact. Does it imply the same ending to Dr. Trescott?

Dr. Trescott stayed in the third layer of responsibility. Let’s first examine the obscurity of the ending of the story. After refusing the good-willed request of a group of four influential men in the town to get rid of Henry, Dr. Trescott came back home and turned out to find his wife had just been threatened by other wives too.

Glancing down at the cups, Trescott mechanically counted them. There were fifteen of them. “There, there,” he said. “Don’t cry, Grace. Don’t cry.”

The wind was whining around the house and the snow beat aslant upon the windows. Sometimes the coal in the stove settled with a crumbling sound and the four panes of mica flushed a sudden new crimson. As he sat holding her head on his shoulder, Trescott found himself occasionally trying to count the cups. There were fifteen of them.

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 117)

We can feel the great impact brought to Dr. Trescott, but we don’t know exactly the next step of action he would take: standing up his original intention, or giving in to his town people. Before this accident, he had confronted a lot of obstacles produced by almost the whole town for his insistence on taking care of Henry, but he never yielded. He thought he should be responsible for Henry’s afterlife, and he was free to be, no matter what others said or did, even at the expense of “changing from being the leading doctor in town to about the last one”

[18]

(Crane, 1969: 115). We can see clearly the firmness of his determination to stick to his own

freedom and responsibility. From the obscure ending what we can definitely and deeply feel is the anguish of freedom and responsibility.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

That was also the point that the author Crane inclined to emphasize by arranging three layers of state of responsibility. He created such an adverse situation to highlight the difficulty and anguish of free choice and commitment. As Sartre said, “The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 4) He furthermore strengthened that “far from being a screen which could separate us from action, it is a condition of action itself.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 5) No matter what Dr. Trescott decided to do next, we believe he would at first make sure what responsibility he could shoulder, and then made his choice based on his free will though in anguish.

4.4 Otherness in The Blue Hotel and The Open Boat

Sartre once declared in his play No Exit: “Hell is other people.”[13](Sartre, 1944: 28)

Three damned souls, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle were brought to the same room in the hell, where there were not any torturing devices waiting for them. It was only a plain room furnished in the Second Empire style, but with no mirrors, and no nights. Each of them had to be forever exposed in the gaze of the other two, for no nights; each of them had to be judged by the other two, for no mirrors. These two conditions of the hell stood for the two aspects of otherness. They were also the causes of “hell is other people”. Take Garcin as an example. On one hand, he could only obtain his reality from Inez’s judgments on him, so he could not leave her; on the other hand, he was not pleased with Inez’s words, and he wanted to convince her to agree with him. He hated her, but he did not will to leave her, on the grounds that he would lose one part of himself without her. They had to stay together and torture each other forever as a kind of punishment. That’s exactly the essence of the hell.

Sartre believes there are two inseparable structures of my being. One is being-for-itself, and the other is being-for-others. “The For-itself refers to the For-others.”[11](Spade, 1995: 222) Only the others can give us a “being-for-others”, and only then can we fully realize all the structures of my being. We need the existence of others. “The other one is the only one who can tell me who I am, what I am.”[11](Spade, 1995: 221) Nevertheless, all other beings are just the same free consciousnesses as my being. They cannot always judge us according to our wills. Of course we still keep our freedom to decide whether to accept others’ judgments or not, but we cannot deny the fact that we can never see ourselves as objectively as others do.

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The being-for-itself and the being-for-others are always in a battle. If we cannot coordinate them and make them well-balanced, we are likely to face the same situation as the characters in No Exit, “Hell is the other people.” However, it does not indicate that our relationships with other people are always as awful as the hell. In some cases, if we can well balance the being-for-itself and the being-for-others, we may appreciate the existence of this relationship. Now we will have a look at Crane’s two stories and see them how to illustrate the two facets of otherness.

4.4.1 The Blue Hotel

In Crane’s short story The Blue Hotel, the Swede absurdly died originally because of playing cards in a certain western city. But if we make a closer analysis of the story, we can say to a large degree, he died of these conflicts of relations with others.

Firstly, at the beginning of the story, the weird words and behaviors of the Swede aroused a strong dislike in the other people of the hotel. Because of his prejudiced fear of the west, he neurotically connected the people and the circumstances around him with these killing things. “Finally, during a lull caused by a new deal, the Swede suddenly addressed Johnnie: ‘I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.’”[18](Crane, 1969: 124) Of course, others would never come to terms with his fantastic judgments. Then he immediately imagined his own death. “…he quavered, ‘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!’ In his eyes was the dying swan look.”[18](Crane, 1969: 125) His arbitrary supposes made him easily lose the advantages in this battle with the other people in the blue hotel, or in the battle between the being-for-itself and the being-for-others. He was thus judged by others as a weird and crazy man.

Secondly, when he found Jimmie cheating in the game of cards, he told the truth, but nobody would like to believe him due to his strange words and behaviors. Here came the problem: the being-for-itself was the truth, but if the Easterner hadn’t affirmed it at the end of the story, how could we know the Swede was right? That is to say, if the being-for-itself conflicted with the being-for-others, no matter whether the former was right or not, it had to be checked by the latter. So the Swede took actions to win the battle between the being-for-itself and the being-for-others. He fought fiercely against Jimmie to defend himself,

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

and he won it. He proved to himself that he was brave and sincere.

Thirdly, after this triumph over Jimmie and also over himself, the Swede wanted to show himself and to obtain favorable judgments from others. That’s what he tried to do in the saloon after he left the blue hotel. Unfortunately, he failed again. As we have said, everyone is a free consciousness. So was the gambler in the saloon. He even did not concern about the Swede’s triumph at all, to say nothing of sharing his pleasure and satisfying his need to be recognized as brave or anything else. The Swede got furious for the gambler’s indifference. He attempted to force the being-for-others to coincide with the being-for-itself, but in vain. He was finally killed by the gambler.

Since the Swede came to the west, he had been in the conflicts with others. Just as what the Easterner said at the end of the story, “This poor gambler isn’t even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.”[18](Crane, 1969: 147) All of them were involved with the conflicting relationship with the Swede. It was these conflicts of relationship collaboratively killed the Swede.

4.4.2 The Open Boat

If The Blue Hotel exemplified Sartre’s famous saying, “Hell is other people”, The Open Boat illustrated the other side of otherness. Sartre never meant that in any case and at any time the relationship among people was as terrible as hell. He only meant it when people could not get well along with others. What’s more, he believed that others were indispensable to the existence of every being. In The Open Boat, it was the teamwork and collaboration of the four men in the boat that conquered the callous and indifferent nature and saved their life. They not only physically relied on each other to struggle for surviving with a rational division of labor, but also mentally counted on each other and thus developed a rare comradeship.

It was really hard to imagine how the four men managed to keep a bathtub-size boat floating on the billowy ocean for several days and nights. We can roughly get the idea from the following detailed descriptions about the difficulties and carefulness of changing seats in the boat. “First the man in the stern slid his hand along the thwart and moved with care, as if he were of Sevres. Then the man in the rowing seat slid his hand along the other thwart. It was all done with the most extraordinary care. As the two sidled past each other, the whole party

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kept watchful eyes on the coming wave, and the captain cried: ‘Look out now! Steady there!’”[18](Crane, 1969: 168) The division of labor in the boat, the captain—the commander, the cook—the bailer and observer, the oiler and the correspondent—the two rowers, was simple, but produced a perfect art of teamwork. “The hurt captain, lying calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey.”[18](Crane, 1969: 170)

In reality, consciously or unconsciously, the author had already treated the four men as one when he portrayed their reflections upon the outside world. In the sixth part of the story, the inner movement was at first all under the singular pronoun “I”, “he”, or singular noun “the man”. In the “Abandonment and Despair” part above, we have cited several paragraphs. After the descriptions of inner movement, the author transferred the call of the characters from the general one to the concrete men in the boat. “The men in the dingey had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind. There was seldom any expression upon their faces save the general one of complete weariness.”[18](Crane, 1969: 180)

Since The Open Boat was based on the writer’s real experience, the feelings and the emotions of the characters were reliable and touching. He must have a deep understanding of comradeship. “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him.”[18](Crane, 1969: 169) Although the natural environment was deadly awful, we could feel the warmth of humanity as deep as the four men in the boat. As Sartre said, the relationship among people was not always upsetting. If people could respect each other’s freedom and get well along with each other, the relationship with other people might not be the hell, but the heaven.

4.5 Bad Faith in The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster

Bad faith was a very important notion in Sartre’s doctrine. It’s a deception toward oneself. We have made it clear in Chapter II. It deserved us to pay much attention to, since according to existentialists, there were no outside values or standards for us to depend upon. We can only depend on ourselves and be responsible to ourselves. If we cannot even be

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

sincere to ourselves, we are doomed. We know Stephen Crane was famous for his portraits of the inner movements of his characters, especially in The Red Badge of Courage, as well as in his short stories. Here we will explore the existential subject of bad faith in The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster.

4.5.1 The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage was the representative work of Stephen Crane. We have known that it was a story occurring during the American Civil War, but the writer did not cope with the war in the way as the traditional war novelists did. The psychological development of a young ordinary soldier called Henry Fleming was the emphasis of the novel. He stood out as the leading role of the story just for the exact reason that he had always been trying to pursue the authenticity of himself, though he at one time or another fell into the deep trap of bad faith. Actually, it was through the revelation of bad faith in the soldiers that the author expressed his strong opposition against the traditional war heroism and the cruelty of the war itself.

Henry Fleming held the same illusion of war with many other young men before he was enlisted. “He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life… In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess.”[16]

Crane, 1983: 2) He took it for granted that he would become a hero so long as he joined the war.

Then when he really was in the war, he realized that he was wrong. He perceived the possibility that he might run from a battle. He was in bad faith before. That was one of the two patterns of bad faith mentioned in Chapter II: denying the facticity or the being-for-others, and emphasizing the transcendence or the being-for-itself. When Henry was excited about his enrollment, his mother discouraged him by warning him what he actually was: “‘…Don’t go a-thinkin’ you can lick the hull rebel army at the start, because yeh can’t. Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh’ve got to keep quiet an’ do what they tell yeh. I know how you are, Henry. …’” [16](Crane, 1983: 5) He was irritated with his mother’s judgments about himself. So he kicked them aside and left home with the illusion of becoming a war hero. Not until the real war was at the corner and he was obsessed by the fear that he might run in a battle, he began to face his own facticity. “He was forced to admit that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.”[16](Crane, 1983: 8) He gradually walked out from the trap of bad faith.

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Meanwhile, his comrades were still suffering from it, although in a different pattern: denying transcendence or being-for-itself, and emphasizing facticity or being-for-others. They only debated on such things as their environment, and the others in their regiment. It seemed that they never tried to hear the voice from their interior world. They denied the freedom and subjectivity of a being-for-itself. When Henry asked his friend Jim: “‘how do you think the reg’ment’ll do?’ ‘Oh, they’ll fight all right, I guess, after they once get into it,’ said the other with cold judgment. He made a fine use of the third person.”[16](Crane, 1983: 9) All he stressed here was the fact that he was only one member of the regiment. He was frightened so much by responsibility that he consciously ignored or gave up his freedom and subjectivity. But Henry wanted to know exactly about his personal thoughts and feelings. “‘Did you ever think you might run yourself, Jim?’”[16](Crane, 1983: 10) “ ‘I’ve thought it might get too hot for Jim Conklin in some of them scrimmages, and if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s’pose I’d start and run. And if I once started to run, I’d run like the devil, and no mistake. But if everybody was a-standing and a-fighting, why, I’d stand and fight. Be jiminey, I would. I’ll bet on it.’”[16](Crane, 1983: 10) Still, Jim held no values and thoughts of his own. He only believed that he would act as what others thought a soldier would act. The balance between facticity and transcendence, between being-for-itself and being-for-others had been badly broken in ordinary soldiers represented by Jim.

Now let’s turn back to the protagonist of the novel, Henry Fleming. He eventually fled from a battle due to his horrible fear. Then he was tortured by a deep feeling of shame and guilt. In the course of seeking excuses to relieve this kind of feeling, he fell into the trap of bad faith once again. The descriptions about Henry’s shame and guilt were splendid. He was so shameful and guilty that he even envied the dead bodies. “He now thought that he wished he was dead. He believed that he envied those men whose bodies lay strewn over the grass of the fields and on the fallen leaves of the forest.”[16](Crane, 1983: 60) He especially envied those wounded soldiers. “He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”[16](Crane, 1983: 52) However, it is from these descriptions that we know he dared not to face his bitter past, the fact that he dropped his weapon and ran in a battle. Instead, he “searched about in his mind for an adequate malediction for the indefinite cause, the thing upon which men turn the words of final blame.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

It—whatever it was—was responsible for him, he said. There lay the fault.”[16](Crane, 1983: 62) Obviously, he was denying his disagreeable facticity. He tried to find something else to be responsible for himself. He now relied too much on his transcendence. “He would have liked to have used a tremendous force, he said, throw off himself and become better.”[16](Crane, 1983:

62)

He really made it. He became much better, and unexpectedly overcame his fear for battles after he accidentally obtained a wound, which was then misunderstood by his comrades as a red badge of courage. He seized the opportunity to abuse his transcendence. He was so eager to shake off the shameful and guilty past, that he became a fighting machine. He was indulged in the war. “Once he, in his intent hate, was almost alone, and was firing, when all those near him had ceased. He was so engrossed in his occupation that he was not aware of a lull.”[16](Crane, 1983: 94) He realized his hero dream through his crazy actions during the last battles. But we say his success was based on his denial of facticity and emphasis of transcendence. He was still in bad faith. The war had made the young soldier alienated from himself and turned him to “a barbarian, a beast.”[16](Crane, 1983: 95) The author thus blamed the unreasonable war with the gradual revelation of bad faith.

Not until the war ended did Henry come back from the alienation. “His mind was undergoing a subtle change. It took moments for it to cast off its battleful ways and resume its accustomed course of thoughts. Gradually his brain emerged from the clogged clouds, and at last he was enabled to more closely comprehend himself and circumstance.”[16](Crane, 1983:

128) After a careful examination of his own deeds, his failures and his achievements, he came

to a conclusion about himself. “He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood.” He finally found himself in the nevertheless absurd world. “Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks.”[16](Crane, 1983: 130-131) He no longer held illusion for the so-called war heroes. He even despised his earlier naïve thoughts about war. “He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.”[16](Crane, 1983: 1) If he really got something from the war, we say he found the true face of the war and of himself.

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4.5.2 The Monster

Besides the important theme of “responsibility” discussed in “3.2 The Anguish of Responsibility”, we find most of the characters in The Monster was in bad faith, by emphasizing on the being-for-others and ignoring the being-for-itself. Bad faith was also the reason that aggravated the conflict between Dr. Trescott and the town people. From the beginning of the story, the author seemed to have shown his interest in bad faith.

The little Jim, after being scolded by his father for his mistake, he came to Henry Johnson for comfort. Soon after his birth he learned by himself to escape unhappiness in bad faith. “Whenever Jimmie became the victim of an eclipse he went to the stable to solace himself with Henry’s crimes. Henry, with the elasticity of his race, could usually provide a sin to place himself on a footing with the disgraced one.”[18](Crane, 1969: 67) Little Jim had a tendency to get solace from others’ mistakes or disadvantages. It seemed that if everybody made mistakes, mistakes would not be mistakes any more. Actually, most of people, if not all of them, once held such a fantasy. It was because Jim was a little child that he could represent the majority of people. They took the universal or conventional things as granted, and doubted or totally ignored their own thoughts if they conflicted with the universal or conventional. That is to say, they emphasized on the being-for-others and ignore the being-for-itself. However, the mistakes had become facts. What’s done cannot be undone. The people like little Jim denied transcendence and emphasized on facticity. They were in bad faith.

The town people like Carrie or Kate were parrots. When they didn’t witness the occurrence but only heard about it, they would judge it as if they had just experienced it. Their only bases were others’ judgments. The following sentences were the typical parrot fashion: “Well, you can’t go against the whole town” [18] (Crane, 1969: 113), “But Martha, everybody says so. Everybody says so.”[18](Crane, 1969: 67) To them, “the whole town” or what “everybody says” were absolutely right. They even would not like to admit the existence of individuality. They were in the same type of bad faith with little Jim: denying transcendence or being-for-itself, and emphasizing facticity or being-for-others.

Martha was a little different from Carrie and Kate. Although she also soon gave up the being-for-itself and turned to the being-for-others, at least she had the consciousness to doubt about what others said or did, no matter whether she pretended to or not. These sentences

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

suggested that Martha might be a perfect existential heroine: “Oh, I don’t care what everybody says” [18] (Crane, 1969: 67); “I’d like to know about what you call ‘the whole town.’ Do you call these silly people who are scared of Henry Johnson ‘the whole town’?”[18](Crane,

1969: 67) Unfortunately, she was soon assimilated and became the allied member of Carrie and

Kate.

Bad faith is the most natural way people may have chosen to elude the anguish of freedom and responsibility. The point here is not to accuse those people in bad faith, but only to hope them to be aware of bad faith and then to walk away from it, like the young soldier Henry Fleming. Bad faith is practically significant, since everyone in reality may have the risk to live in bad faith. Only when we face the true sides of ourselves, can we then find the most effective and efficient way to solve the problem. Escaping can never essentially lighten the misery. Instead, it may make things worse after a long time of accumulation.

Although in the above parts of this chapter, we only emphasized on one or two aspects of existential ideas in each story of Crane’s, these sporadic aspects can be reunited under the flag of freedom and responsibility, which also are the theoretical starting point of this thesis and the core of Sartre’s existentialism. No matter what kinds of situations they were in, Crane’s characters still kept free wills and thus should be responsible for themselves. Henry Fleming finally overcame his fear toward war and became a true man; the three men of the four in the little boat survived the terrible shipwreck in the long run; the Swede actually killed himself by misunderstanding the relationship with others; Dr. Trescott chose to be responsible for the saver of his son, and he struggled to be responsible to this responsibility. Although the four stories coincided with naturalism in many places, they were by no means pure naturalism writings. It seemed that Crane preferred to be an existentialist. Maybe this conclusion should better be made after we have a close check of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

4.6 The Special Case: Maggie

Maggie was the first important work of Stephen Crane, also one of the few that were led by female characters. It has always been regarded as the first representative novel of American naturalism. All of Crane’s writings were not entertaining, because all of them placed the characters in severe environments. However, Maggie maybe was the most

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miserable story ever created by Crane. Its sadness not only originated from the abominable living environment of Maggie, but also from the lack of any free will or subjectivity of the protagonist. Although we can evidently feel the sarcasm against Maggie, we find that the author eventually unloaded the responsibility of her, and he attributed the whole tragedy of Maggie to her living environment. This strange phenomenon made Maggie different from Crane’s other works, especially those led by male characters, whose subjective efforts and personal responsibility in an adverse circumstance were usually the emphasis of the writer. As a special case, we now will at first analyze the freedom and responsibility topic of Maggie from the feminist aspect to explain this strange difference.

4.6.1 Freedom and Responsibility

What kind of person was Maggie on earth? No doubt, in Crane’s eyes, she was pretty, pure, and deserved our most generous sympathy. She grew up in that a dirty milieu, lived with that a drunken and grumpy mother and no better brother, and fell in love with that an irresponsible poseur. Because of all these factors, she was forced to be a streetwalker and finally ended her own young life. But if we read the text more deeply and more broadly, we will find that’s not the whole truth. The standards by which the author judged Maggie were based on his prejudice against female.

Firstly, Maggie was a superficial and money-oriented girl. There were a large number of sarcastic paints about Maggie’s illusional judgments of her swaggering lover Pete. She gave us such an impression that she paid as much attention to appearance as Pete did. After two paragraphs of descriptions of Pete, who just knew to put on airs, here came the conclusion of Maggie: she “thought he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender.”[18](Crane, 1969: 18) What attracted her in Pete were all those exterior and substantial things. “Pete’s elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had money and manners. It was probable that he had a large acquaintance of pretty girl. He must have great sums of money to spend.”[18](Crane, 1969: 20) “Swaggering Pete loomed like a golden sun to Maggie.”[18](Crane, 1969: 20) It was because of this man that Maggie decided to put all her eggs in one basket. “She began to note, and with more interest, the well-dressed women she met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

women.”[18](Crane, 1969: 25) The material desire thus drew Maggie step by step into the deep pit of despair. If in the following sentence: “As she had seen him twice and he had different suits on each time, Maggie had a dim impression that his wardrobe was prodigiously extensive” [18] (Crane, 1969: 21), we can still narrowly find some excuses for Maggie’s shallowness, such as her poor environment and education, it does not sound reasonable that every girl in slums must be superficial and money-oriented.

Secondly, Maggie was a weak, mindless and dependent person. In Nellie’s words, she was “a little pale thing with no spirit” [18] (Crane, 1969: 51). She admitted willingly her subordinate position to men, because she agreed with men that appearance of women was the all-important thing for men to choose women. “Too, she thought that Pete to be a very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.”[18](Crane, 1969: 26) She did not think there was anything wrong with Pete’s particular concern of the appearance of women; instead, she regarded that was his pride and capacity. Since she had a relation with Pete, she was not herself any longer. “From her eyes had been plucked all look of self-reliance. She leaned with a dependent air toward her companion. She was timid, as if fearing his anger or displeasure. She seemed to beseech tenderness of him.”[18](Crane, 1969: 39) After being humiliated by Pete, who left her alone in the bar on behalf of another woman, Nellie, Maggie still came to him begging for acceptance. She belittled herself to such a degree that it seemed what Pete had done to her was all right and it was all her own faults to be deserted by him. Rudely rejected by Pete, Maggie was still unaware why she was in such a dilemma. “She wandered aimlessly for several blocks. She stopped once and asked aloud a question of herself: ‘Who?’”[18](Crane,

1969: 53)

Actually, the author had provided an answer for Maggie’s question. Despite those ironies against her ignorance, superficiality, inferiority and mindlessness, Crane believed that the vile circumstances should be responsible for all these weak points of Maggie. Except directly describing the abominable slum street and the life of these people, the writer also gave some implications for the answer. We just pick two as examples: one was from the aspect of Maggie’s brother Jimmie, another was from Maggie herself.

Jimmie thought his sister humiliated him by leaving home with his friend Pete, but, “arguing with himself, stumbling about in ways that he knew not, he once, almost came to a

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conclusion that his sister would have been more firmly good had she better known why.”[18](Crane, 1969: 44) That is to say, if Maggie could receive more education and know better about the world, she would not have degenerated. However, even education might not change the nature or value of a person. If Maggie had been brought up in a rich family, and accepted a good education, she might still have had the same miserable ending, if she still judged people only by their appearances, only craved material matters and depended too much on men.

The author also conveyed the same meaning from the angle of Maggie herself. “She contemplated Pete’s man-subduing eyes and noted that wealth and prosperity was indicated by his clothes. She imagined a future, rose-tinted, because of its distance from all that she previously had experienced.”[18](Crane, 1969: 40) What she considered here was of no difference from his brother’s scarce kindness. The author implied here that Maggie’s dream and judgments were limited by her poor experiences. However, it’s not a question of quantity, but of quality. Maggie herself should be responsible for her tragedy. Furthermore, it was herself who made all these choices that resulting in the unhappy ending. If we involved the other two female characters and other stories led by male characters, we can figure out why Crane treated Maggie partially, and why Maggie did not show any free wills and did not need to shoulder any responsibilities.

Mary and Nellie were the other two important female characters in Maggie. Mary was Maggie’s mother, who played a totally negative role in the story. She was not a good wife, due to whom her husband regarded their home as a “reg’lar livin’ hell” [18] (Crane, 1969: 11). She was neither a good mother. Always drunken, and ready to lose her temper, she never considered to create a warm and favorable environment for her children. When she heard of her daughter’s death, she even did not actually feel sad. “‘Deh hell she is,’ said the woman. She continued her meal. When she finished her coffee she began to weep.”[18](Crane, 1969: 60) Undoubtedly, Mary, such a grim, selfish, drunken and ill-tempered crazy woman was never popular with men. Although nothing sparkling can we find in Mary, there is at least one point that we can affirm: she was a stronger woman than ordinary men in one sense.

Nellie was a lover cheat. She was called “a woman of brilliance and audacity” [18] (Crane,

1969: 45) by the author, but we cannot perceive any respect or affirmation about her. She only

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

appeared to prove the fallacious love between Pete and Maggie. It was she who caused Pete to leave Maggie, and it was she who fooled Pete by abandoning him and taking his money away. Never being a good woman in the author’s eyes, Nellie shared one thing with Mary: she was the kind of strong women who could give men a big shock. In that an unfair society this kind of women was scarce and unpopular with men, who just wanted to dominate everything. The women like Maggie, weak, dependent, self-contempt, were the apples in their eyes.

As a man, Stephen Crane held the same viewpoint toward women. His prejudice to women not only embodied in the desire to dominate over women, but also in his different standards to his male and female characters.

As we have analyzed in the former parts of this chapter, those male protagonists in The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Monster, all showed their free wills more or less. Furthermore, they were portrayed as the bearers of their own actions. Maggie, however, was not requested to shoulder what she should. In the author eyes, it sufficed for her to be pretty, pure, tender, and obedient. His sympathy and prejudice just deprived Maggie’s fundamental rights as a human being: freedom and responsibility.

4.6.2 Bad Faith

Although as a man, Crane favored Maggie and defended for her faults, his irony and criticism to the other characters were uncompromising, especially to those who lived in bad faith and never considered to walk out from it. Mary, Pete and Jimmie are to be involved in the analysis of bad faith here.

Despite so much vileness has been mentioned above about Mary, the most unforgivable is her crocodile tears after she heard of her daughter’s death. It’s incredible for a mother to react like Mary. “‘Deh hell she is,’ said the woman. She continued her meal. When she finished her coffee she began to weep.”[18](Crane, 1969: 60) If callosity is still understandable since it is a personal choice, Mary’s pretence is unforgivable. She was playing to be sad in order to meet others’ expectation and request. She could not maintain to be herself and to behave as a hardhearted mother before others as she was, so she decided to highlight her being-for-others and hide her being-for-itself. She dared not to shoulder the whole responsibility of practicing the freedom to be the true self. Then we say she was in bad faith. In another occasion the writer slashed Mary’s playing for others. After Maggie was

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abandoned by Pete, she once came back home for help. Her mother, Mary, instead of offering a hand for her, took it a good chance to humiliate her own daughter. She regarded it a perfect opportunity to prove to the neighbors that it was not her fault to cause her daughter’s degeneration. “The loud, tremendous sneering of the mother brought the denizens of the Rum Alley tenement to their doors.”[18](Crane, 1969: 50) She was so eager to show to others that she had nothing with her shameful daughter. “Maggie’s mother paced to and fro, addressing the doorful of eyes, expounding like a glib showman at a museum. Her voice rang through the building.”[18](Crane, 1969: 50) It seemed that she was revenging herself by letting others all despise her own daughter. How important she took others’ opinions!

Pete was also a coward, who deserted Maggie, and dared not bear the responsibility for his own choices. He always intended to find different kinds of excuses for himself. “Pete did not consider that he had ruined Maggie. If he had thought that her soul could never smile again, he would have believed the mother and brother, who were pyrotechnic over the affair, to be responsible for it.”[18](Crane, 1969: 51) When Nellie made some negative comments on Maggie, Pete immediately asserted that “he never was very much interested in the girl.”[18](Crane, 1969: 52) The same with Mary, he always put others’ comments above his own choices. He always tried to deny his being-for-itself when it conflicted with the being-for-others. “If he was laughed at for his taste in women, he felt obliged to say that they were only temporary or indifferent ones.”[18](Crane, 1969: 52)

As regards Jimmie, Maggie’s brother, was also the kind of people who allowed others’ judgments overtop themselves’. He thought he had to let others believe he was shameful for his sister’s leaving home with his best friend. “Of course Jimmie publicly damned his sister that he might appear on a higher social plane. But, arguing with himself, stumbling about in ways that he knew not, he, once, almost came to a conclusion that his sister would have been more firmly good had she better known why. However, he felt that he could not hold such a view. He threw it hastily aside.”[18](Crane, 1969: 43-44) When the being-for-itself conflicted with the being-for-others, he unhesitatingly chose the latter. Jimmie was also such a poor creature who lived in bad faith and never aware of it.

Crane discussed this particular pattern of bad faith in Maggie: emphasizing facticity or being-for-others, and denying transcendence or being-for-itself. He demonstrated fully by

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

sarcastically exposing the three characters Mary, Pete, and Jimmie that the life of people in bad faith was a total failure.

The reason why we said Maggie was a special case compared to Crane’s other stories was that the author vindicated his heroine in a sense by taking off the moral responsibility she should have shouldered. It made Maggie sound more like a novel of naturalism. The problem was that the ironic descriptions of Maggie and other roles all led us to the opposite opinion: they should be responsible for their choices and actions. After analyzing this contradiction we got such a conclusion that Crane had a discrimination against women in the sense that he favored and took pity on these pretty, tender and obedient women, and thus lessened the requirements for them and removed their moral responsibilities. However, Maggie was still rich in existential ideas, such as bad faith. In a word, though as a special case, Maggie demonstrated Crane’s existential orientation from another direction. And if even Maggie can be used as a piece of evidence for Crane’s existential orientation, we might as well pay attention to the universality of his existential ideas in his works.

硕士学位论文

Conclusion

In this conclusion part of the whole thesis, we will mainly deal with three problems. Firstly, what are the common points between Stephen Crane and Jean-Paul Sartre? Secondly, why can we apply Sartre’s existentialism to analyze Stephen Crane’s life and works? Thirdly, what are the practical significances of this thesis?

Although Sartre and Crane lived in two different centuries, they shared a lot in both personal life and literary works, which reflected the marvelous resemblances of their philosophical considerations about the human existence in extreme situations.

As we have mentioned in the previous chapters, both the life of Sartre and that of Crane were as observable as their achievements in career. Their legendary life experiences—their controversial relationship with women, their zealous participation in social life, and so on—proved to us how important it was to exercise one’ s freedom. No matter what kinds of obstacles they confronted, they chose to act according to their inner standards, instead of these exterior social morals, conventions or authorities. In the meantime, they shouldered the responsibility for their free choices and actions. Therefore, both Sartre and Crane were personally good fulfillers of freedom and responsibility, and firm pursuer of authenticity.

As regards their literature works, we have already introduced some of Sartre’s situation plays and Crane’s novels and short stories respectively in Chapter II and Chapter IV. Here we might as well make a simple comparison between them. In The Flies, Sartre emphasized the importance and delights of recognizing the freedom of beings, and highly praised the courage to bear the heavy and torturing responsibility; while in Death Without Burial, he stressed the anguish and cruelty of responsibility. No Exit mainly probed into the themes of otherness and bad faith. Sartre’s situation plays perfectly coincided with his existential propositions. However, Crane might even have not heard of “existentialism”. In fact, he never claimed that he belonged to any kinds of schools. Surprisingly, we are able to find those existential concerns about human existence like freedom and responsibility, otherness and bad faith in his main works, though not as obviously as in Sartre’s plays. In The Monster we can almost feel the same anguish of choosing and responsibility as in Death Without Burial; The Blue Hotel deciphered Sartre’s famous saying “Hell is other people” in No Exit; in both Maggie: A

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage, bad faith was a lasting topic. Furthermore, the writings of both Sartre and Crane were not pleasing. We can find both writers showed their close concerns to these discriminated groups, like prostitutes and black people, Sartre in The Respectful Prostitute, Crane in Maggie and The Monster. Through exposing the vileness of society, they called upon the readers to concern themselves with their own situations and make some changes if necessary. Sartre called this kind of literature “committed literature”, the opposite of pure literature, or the “art for artist’s sake”.

Sartre put forward the concept of “committed literature” in What is Literature? Here “commitment” means “literature should not be a sedative, a feel-good pill or a sub-division of the entertainment industry. It should be an irritant that would provoke men to change the world in which they lived and in so doing change themselves. By adopting this role the writer would ensure that the content of his work would avoid sterile dogmatism; it would be addressed to the potentially free reader and by doing so, the writer would also be freeing himself.”[13](Vyes, 2006)

However, Sartre thought only prose could be called “committed literature”, and poetry was excluded. He believed that “prose is capable of a purposeful reflection of the world, whereas poetry is an end in itself.”[15](Vyes, 2006) So Sartre was almost everything but never a poet. Nevertheless, Crane was. He published two poetry anthologies, The Black Riders and War Is Kind, altogether about 135 pieces of poems. In those poems Crane expressed kindred existential subjects as in his novels and short stories. For example, in “A Man Said to the Universe”, there are such lines as: “A Man said to the universe: / ‘Sir, I exist!’ / ‘However,’ replied the universe, / ‘The fact has not created in me / A sense of obligation.”[19](Crane, 2006) When we analyzed The Open Boat, we have mentioned the indifference of the universe or nature, which brought man into despair in the existential sense. Despite their divarication over the form of “committed literature”, Sartre and Crane came to terms with the function of literature: to make some influences on the real world.

In conclusion, no matter from the life of Sartre and Crane, or from their literature works, we can see the amazing resemblances between them, which focus on the five aspects of existentialism: freedom, responsibility, bad faith, otherness, and committed literature.

In fact, apart from Stephen Crane, there were many other men of letters before Sartre

硕士学位论文

who had expressed existential ideas in their works. Let’s just take Confucius as an example. As we know, The Analects of Confucius has produced inestimable influence on the history of China over more than 2000 years. It has also been translated into dozens of languages and warmly welcomed by foreign readers nowadays. Its total circulation is only inferior to that of Bible. We cannot help wondering why it is still so popular both home and abroad after coming through such a long history. There must be something in it that is never outdated. Actually, Confucius and his disciples in the analects just managed to seek a most effective and efficient way to making one’s life more significant, both to oneself and to others.

Confucius attached much importance to the cultivation of the inner world of individuals. He once said, “The demands that a gentleman makes are upon himself; those that a small man makes are upon others.”[20] (Confucius, 1999: 177)1 He strengthened to be severe with oneself and tolerant towards others. In The Analects, he made such comments in several places: “(A gentleman) Does not grieve that people do not recognize his merits; he grieves at his own incapacities.”[20](Confucius, 1999: 163)2 There may be two interpretations to this sentence. One is that it doesn’t matter that others don’t recognize my merits, because I don’t care only if I am competent; the other is that it doesn’t matter that others don’t recognize my merits, because I have a more important thing to do: to make myself competent. No matter which explanation we choose, we cannot deny Confucius’ stress on the inner improvement of human existence.

As for the outside world, Confucius deemed that a real being could not be limited in the unpleasant realities. What mattered indeed was the attitude toward them. He once praised his favorite student Yanhui: “Incomparable indeed was Hui! A handful of rice to eat, a gourdful of water to drink, living in a mean street—others would have found it unendurably depressing, but to Hui’s cheerfulness it made no difference at all. Incomparable indeed was Hui!”[20](Confucius, 1999: 57)3

In the eyes of Confucius, the cultivation of oneself was much more important and more effective than the complaints about others and unchangeable facts. Then in order to perfect oneself, one has to realize the importance of one’s initiative and subjectivity. Once when he

孔子著。论语(The Analects). 韦利英译, 杨伯峻今译。第177页. 中文：君子求诸己，小人求诸人。第176页同上。第163页。中文: 不患人之不己知，患其不能也。第162页 3

同上。第57页。中文: 贤哉，回也！一箪食，一瓢饮，在陋巷，人不堪其忧，回也不改其乐。贤哉，回也！第56页

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

talked about Goodness, he said, “Is Goodness indeed so far away? If we really wanted Goodness, we should find that it was at our very side.”[20](Confucius, 1999: 73)1 This sentence implies that every one of us could reach Goodness, if only we could make enough good actions. As Sartre claimed, man was defined by his actions. Confucius paid as much attention to action as Sartre did. “He (a true gentleman) does not preach what he practices till he has practiced what he preaches.”[20](Confucius, 1999: 15)2

Furthermore, Confucius suggested us to do what we could do at present. This reminds us once more Sartre’s opinion: we should act in despair and without illusion. He once said, “I must confine myself to what I can see.”[10](Sartre, 1946: 8) Zilu, one of Confucius’ disciples, once asked his master how one should serve ghosts and spirits. “The Master said, ‘Till you have learnt to serve men, how can you serve ghosts?’ Zilu then ventured upon a question about the dead. The Master said, ‘Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?’”[20](Confucius, 1999: 113)3 There is another sentence that more directly conveys the similar meaning: only to do what we can do. “A gentleman is ashamed to let his words outrun his deeds.”[20](Confucius, 1999: 163)4

As we see, The Analects of Confucius abounds with existential ideas. It is these existential concerns about being and existence that help this great book come down and go around. As a matter of fact, everyone may confront such problems everyday: What should I do to improve myself? How to deal with the conflicts between others and me, between the outside world and my inner world? Am I sincere to myself at this moment? As it is, our everyday life is the spring of the so-called existentialism. We can find existential thoughts in ancient China, so we can in the 19th century America, so we can in the 20th century France. Only these original great people did systemize them and put them into words, thus to warn us and to encourage us to get improved continually. Therefore, when we say to analyze Stephen Crane in existentialism, we are only referring to the systemized and influential existentialism prevailing in the 20th century and represented by Jean-Paul Sartre. On one hand, existential ideas are universal in the history of the world; on the other hand, Stephen Crane was a genius

. 孔子著。论语(The Analects). 韦利英译, 杨伯峻今译。第73页. 原文: 仁远乎哉？我欲仁，斯仁矣。第72页同上。第15页. 原文: 先行其言而后从之。第14页 3

同上。第113页. 原文: 子路问事鬼神。子曰：“未能事人，焉能事鬼？” 曰：“敢问生死。” 曰：“未知生，焉知死？第112页 4

同上。第163页. 原文: 君子耻其言而过其行。第162页

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who paid much attention to originality and human existences. That’s why we could use existentialism to explore his life and works.

Up to now, this thesis has comprehensively analyzed Stephen Crane’s life and his most important stories from the perspective of existentialism. The chief and original purpose of this paper was supposed to clarify some misunderstandings about Stephen Crane prevailing in the home critical society, such as “Crane was a pure naturalist”. Through the existential analysis of Stephen Crane and his works, we earn a new and deeper understanding of him. What’s more, we come by a more lucid knowledge of ourselves as well as others. During the research of Stephen Crane, we become more familiar with existentialism, which causes us to be more confident on ourselves and more tolerant to others.

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

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[44] 萨特. 向阳, 刘晓建编. 萨特论快乐的自我. 长春: 北方妇女儿童出版社, 2004 [45] 萨特. 沈志明等译. 李瑜青, 凡人主编. 萨特戏剧集(上). 合肥: 安徽文艺出版社,

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[46] 魏义霞. 七子视界・先秦哲学研究. 北京:中国社会科学出版社, 2005 [47] 吴岳添. 萨特传. 北京：新世界出版社，2003

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附录A 攻读学位期间所发表的学术论文目录

[1] 李丽瑰. 存在主义和女性主义双重视角下的《玛吉》.中南民族大学学报(人文社会科

学版), 2006, (12):181-183

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

附录 B 详细中文摘要

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

本文的理论出发点是美国自然主义作家史蒂芬・克莱恩和以爱弥尔・左拉为代表的正统自然主义者之间的分歧。克莱恩作品中所表现出来的对人物自由意志和相应责任的密切关注，以及作品中浓厚的讽刺色彩，都向我们表明克莱恩不是一个纯粹的自然主义者。这些分歧让我们很自然地把克莱恩与20世纪著名的存在主义者让-保尔・萨特联系起来，因为自由意志与责任正是存在主义作品中人物最根本的权利和义务。而克莱恩放荡不羁、玩世不恭的个人生活也与萨特个性十足的生活有着惊人的相似，这就更坚定了本文运用萨特的存在主义理论来解析克莱恩的生活和作品的决心和信心，以此来挖掘史蒂芬・克莱恩一个少为人知却又非常重要的方面。

首先，本文将简要介绍萨特的生活、哲学和文学。萨特无论是在生活中，还是在哲学和文学中，都始终强调自由与责任的重要性。基于这一点，他在现实生活中我行我素、特立独行，但又因其强烈的社会责任感而备受尊崇；他的哲学被称为“自由的哲学”，因为自由是萨特存在主义哲学的核心，但是他同时也强调与自由直接挂钩的许多其他重要的存在主义概念，如责任、处境和自欺；他的文学，尤其是他的境遇剧，是他所倡导的“介入文学”的典型例子。在萨特看来，介入文学是作者对读者自由的一种召唤。萨特的哲学思想是一个不断发展完善的完整的体系，有的学者把它分成了三个阶段：初期，中期和后期。本文只着重介绍他的中期思想，因为这是萨特存在主义的成熟期，也是他最具典型代表的时期。《存在与虚无》和《存在主义是一种人道主义》是这一时期最重要的，也是影响最广泛的两个哲学作品，本文将主要根据这两个作品从萨特自由概念的本体论依据开始介绍存在主义，主体部分是自由概念以及由此展开的其他存在主义观念。

在对萨特的理论有了一个基本的了解之后，我们将开始对克莱恩的生活进行存在主义分析。首先我们将对克莱恩个人生活中的叛逆性进行分析。他出生于一个虔诚的宗教家庭，却过着一种浪荡不羁、玩世不恭的生活；他曾经公开在法庭上为一位妓女辩护，并且与一位开高级妓院的女人度过了自己人生最后的一段旅程，这是对当时社会道德标准的一种极大的叛逆。然后我们将对克莱恩生活与作品之间的独特关系进行剖析。他不像一般的作者那样先有实际的生活体验，再在作品中体现和描写现实生活；而是先写作

硕士学位论文

品，再在现实生活中体验和检验作品中的事件。他与他的两部代表作品《红色英勇勋章》和《街头女郎玛吉》都有着这样的关系。从这些叛逆性和独特之处我们可以看出，克莱恩的一生是追求自我和自由的一生。

在接下来的第四章中，本文将重点分析克莱恩作品中的存在主义思想。首先将介绍所有故事的境遇，并认为他们都属于“介入文学”。考虑到《街头女郎玛吉》是克莱恩所有作品中自然主义色彩最浓厚的一部，本文接下来将分两步进行，首先分析了存在主义思想明显的四篇小说，分别对《海上扁舟》中的抛弃和绝望，《怪物》中的自由与责任的痛苦，《蓝色旅馆》和《海上扁舟》中与他人的关系，以及《红色英勇勋章》和《怪物》中的自欺进行了挖掘。然后再对《街头女郎玛吉》作特例分析。

《海上扁舟》中的人物并不是从一开始就意识到处于被抛弃的境地,并主动放弃一切幻想,怀着绝望的心境应对周遭的困难的。他们是在残酷的现实面前一步一步地认识到无论是命运还是上帝都是不可靠的，只有依靠自己的实际行动和主观努力，才有可能改变现实状况。由此他们从束手无策的自然主义走向了自主创造的存在主义。从这个层面上来讲,抛弃和绝望也是有其积极意义的。

《怪物》表面看来是在讨论道德伦理上的责任，即主人公是否应该对儿子的救命恩人负责到底的问题。但是稍作深入分析我们就可以得出，作者其实是在探讨存在主义层面上的责任，即是否对自己做出的选择负责。在这一节中，本文将把《怪物》中的人物按责任的三个层次归为三类。第一类人根本就没有意识到承担自由选择的责任的必要性，或者说出于对承担责任的痛苦的恐惧，漠视承担责任的必要性；第二类人虽然意识到了承担责任的必要性，但是很快就在承担责任的痛苦面前退缩了；第三类人不仅意识到了承担责任的必要性，而且对承担责任的痛苦有着非常清醒的认识，并在痛苦中做出自由选择。《怪物》很好地诠释了萨特关于自由、责任和痛苦之间的关系。

《蓝色旅馆》和《海上扁舟》分别从相反的两个方面对萨特关于与他人的关系的观点进行了探讨。《蓝色旅馆》是萨特名言“他人即地狱”的一个很好的例证。本文具体分析了其中被扭曲的与他人的关系是如何一步一步地把那个瑞典人逼上绝路的。虽然萨特很少从正面说明与他人的关系，“他人即地狱”也因此被世人误认为是与他人的唯一关系，但是萨特强调只有当与他人的关系被扭曲的时候，“他人即地狱”才成立。《海上扁舟》就论证了这一点。故事中的四个主人公同心协力、团结一致对抗共同的敌人，并最终赢得了胜利。这让我们相信，他人并不总是地狱，他人也有可能是天堂。

《红色英勇勋章》和《怪物》都对其中人物的自欺进行了剖析。《红色英勇勋章》

对史蒂芬・克莱恩生活与作品的存在主义研究

的主人公弗莱明的心理成长历程实际上是他与自欺进行较量的过程。他曾经两进两出自欺的生存状态，并最终看清了自身和战争的真正面目。作者通过对自欺的揭露，也表达了对传统意义上的战争英雄和战争的强烈反对。前面已经讨论过《怪物》中自由与责任的痛苦，其实自欺与痛苦通常是紧密联系在一起的。人们往往通过自欺来逃避自由与责任的痛苦。在这里本文将继续分析上文提到的《怪物》中第一类人和第二类人所处的自欺的生存状态。

《街头女郎玛吉》是克莱恩少有的以女性作为主角的一部作品。却也正因为此，该作品中的自然主义色彩显得尤为浓厚,自由与责任的主题也不像上述以男性为主角的四个故事中那么突显。在这一节中，本文将首先结合女性主义对这一特殊性做出解释。通过对比分析，本文认为，玛吉之所以虽屡受作者讥讽，却最终得以免除本应担负的人生和道德的责任，是因为作者克莱恩对身为弱者的漂亮女性的同情和偏袒降低了对她的要求，由此剥夺了她作为人的最根本的权利和义务。之后本文分析了小说中其他处于自欺状况的主要人物。《街头女郎玛吉》中的讽刺几乎无处不在，无论是对女主角玛吉，还是对其他相关人物，作者都给予了辛辣的讽刺。本文将从这些讽刺中探寻作者克莱恩对自欺的思考。《街头女郎玛吉》的特例分析证明了克莱恩作品中存在主义思想的普遍性。

在最后的总结部分，本文首先概括了萨特和克莱恩之间生活和作品中惊人的相通之处。然后通过孔子的例子，即《论语》中也闪烁着存在主义思想，进一步证明即使在萨特之前，文学作品中也普遍存在着存在主义思想。这是因为存在主义本身就是对人的生存的一些最基本问题的思考，再由以萨特为代表的一批哲学家使之理论化、系统化才形成的。因此，我们完全可以对克莱恩这样一个关注人类生存状态的原创型作家进行存在主义分析。最后，本文阐明了这项研究的现实意义：它不仅让我们对克莱恩的生活和作品有了更深入的了解，而且也让我们对自身以及他人有了更清醒的认识。

关键词：自然主义；存在主义；自由；责任；自欺；与他人的关系

硕士学位论文

Acknowledgements

I would like to give my acknowledgements and thanks to all that have contributed in one way or another to the fulfillment of my graduate courses and the completion of this thesis.

Above all, I owe a great deal to my respectable supervisor, Professor Wang Minqin. She gave me a lot of inspirations and instructions during the writing of this thesis. I also am grateful for her innovative delivering of classes.

Then I would like to present my sincere thanks to my roommates and classmates who gave me much help both in life and study.

Finally, special thanks go to my family members, whose selfless love and tender care are always the springs of my courage and confidence.

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