The Indifferent Universe

The Shape of Absence

Crane’s most famous opening — “None of them knew the color of the sky” — is a theological statement disguised as a naturalistic observation. The men in the open boat cannot look up; they are too busy surviving. The sky above them — the traditional location of divine presence, the place from which help might come — is unknown to them. They are entirely on their own.

This is the naturalist vision in miniature: the reduction of the human horizon to the immediately pressing, the elimination of the transcendent dimension that would give the suffering meaning, the insistence that the universe is simply indifferent to whether these men live or die. Crane renders this vision with a precision and a pathos that make its inadequacy visible.

What The Open Boat Reveals

The story’s most devastating moment is the observation that the correspondent, who has been rowing for hours, finds himself angry at a windmill on the shore — angry because it is indifferent to his suffering, because it goes on turning regardless of whether he drowns. This anger at indifference is the most theologically significant emotion in Crane’s fiction: it is the anger of a creature who believes, against his naturalist convictions, that he deserves to be noticed.

The anger presupposes the expectation. And the expectation presupposes a world in which human suffering matters to someone. Crane’s naturalism cannot account for the anger it produces in his characters.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the woman enters the fallen world and shares its suffering rather than standing indifferent to it. The God of the gospel is the answer to Crane’s windmill: not the indifferent cosmic machinery of naturalism but the God who gets into the boat, who rows with the dying, who notices the color of the sky even when the men cannot.

Crane’s fiction is a testimony to the shape of the need that the gospel addresses. His universe is the universe from which the incarnation has been removed, and the horror of that universe — rendered with such precision in his best work — is the most powerful argument for the necessity of the incarnation that a secular literature can produce.

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