Yellow Sky Essay

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Yellow Sky When Stephen Crane’s short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” starts out, it seems like it will be a love story. The reader soon comes to realize it is more than a simple love story as it is more about the town of Yellow Sky and its westernization and civilization. The central theme in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is modernism and renovation of the old west. The author illustrates this by starting out the story with the couple boarding a train to head westward to Yellow Sky. The train is showing how the Texans have become civilized. It acts as a vehicle from the state of the art east to aged west. In the first section of the story, Crane tells of how Jack Potter has gone east and met and married a woman who is older and more civilized. The reader gets the vision Jack is becoming a new man civilized man by his appearance. He constantly looks down at his attire to respectful admire it. It states he has “new black clothes” (300) and a “little silver watch” (301). This gives us the idea this is not what Jack normally wears. To help prove the point, the story also states that his “face was reddened from many days in the sun and wind” suggesting he wore work clothes daily and not suits or good new clothes. The next section starts the scene out in the ‘Weary Gentlemen saloon’ with the drummer. The reader gets the idea of the old west by the name of the saloon. The name ‘Weary’ adds to the old west theme by meaning old weary cowboys. When I think of the old west saloon, I think of a place where the old cowboys go after a long day’s work. The ‘drummer’ coming into the bar could symbolize the eastern ways moving west. Crane goes on to say the bartender actions are “moving like a ghost” (pg.304). This may signify that the eastern civilization is slow moving into this part of the frontier. Scratchy Wilson, the old west man, is

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