The Monster and Other Stories by Stephen Crane
In its finest detail, Stephen Crane's "The Monster" is the story of a black carter who saves his employer's young son, a respected small-town doctor, from certain death in a fire that destroys the doctor's home. . During the rescue process, the black man, Henry Johnson, is terribly burned. When he recovers under the doctor's healing hands, in addition to seemingly losing his mental capacity, Henry also loses face; in fact, the only recognizable feature in his scarred face is a single "winking eye".
Due to his debt to Henry, Dr. Trescott insists that the injured man be cared for by a black family. This family, however, like everyone else in town, is terrified of Henry's monstrous appearance. Eventually, Henry escapes from his keepers and scares a number of people he meets in the city before being captured and returned to Dr. Trescott. Henry lives relatively undisturbed with the Trescotts, but his presence in their family affects the doctor, his wife and his son. The boy, Jimmie, gains notoriety among his peers thanks to the strange figure of Henry who inhabits his yard. Dr. Trescott, however, constantly loses business so that his practice and her status in the community diminish dramatically, and Mrs. Trescott is subject to the contempt of her friends, who refuse her customary Wednesday afternoon tea invitation.
Although Henry, through his radical change in appearance from a dapper young man wearing lavender trousers to a grotesque figure, is central to Crane's story, his main action involves changing the relationships between the various figures in the city, a change determined by Henry's metamorphosis. Of primary importance is the alteration of Dr. Trescott's relationship with the city. Dr. Trescott initially appears as a benevolent judge in matters of human conduct. When, in the opening episode of the story, little Jimmie breaks a peony in the family garden pretending to be a locomotive, the doctor executes a gentle but fair punishment: "Well, Jimmie," he says, "I guess you'd better not play train today. "Both Jimmie and Henry, to whom Jimmie retires when he suffers an" eclipse "from his father's favor, perceive Dr. Trescott as" the moon, "a beacon of correct behavior, a moral eminence. Trescott also enjoys similar admiration within the city where he is, at first, "the chief physician". Henry Johnson's fire and disfigurement, however, change that.
Feeling obligated to use his medical skills to heal the man who saved his son, Trescott becomes something of a Doctor Frankenstein. An old friend, Judge Hagenthorpe, advises him against intervening in the natural course of events: he is purely your creation. Nature has evidently given up on him. He died. You're bringing it back to life. You are creating it and it will be a monster and mindless.
The doctor, however, only sees that Henry "saved my boyfriend". His sense of moral obligation stems from this ...
