The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky

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The Characters And Setting In “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky"
On November 1, 1871 Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey. In 1898 Crane’s book The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure was published. In this book is one of Crane’s most popular short stories called “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” It is a strange tale of Jack Potter, an insecure marshal of a small Texas town on the Rio Grande, Yellow Sky. He has supposedly committed an extraordinary crime and failed in his duty to the “innocent and unsuspecting community” (Crane 189), by not informing the townspeople that he was going to San Antonio to court and marry “a girl he believed he loved” (Crane 189). Returning with his plain, underclass bride, the guilt-ridden man fears a bad “scene of amazement, glee, [and] reproach” (Crane 190). Before the arrival of the newlyweds, Scratchy Wilson, the town’s bad man and the marshal’s longtime trigger-happy opponent, is on a drunken rampage. In this short story, both the characters and setting have symbolic meaning.
The first character introduced in the story is Jack Potter. “The man’s face was reddened from many days in the wind and sun, and a direct result of his new black clothes was that his brick-colored hands were constantly performing in a most conscious fashion. From time to time he looked down respectfully at his attire. He sat with a hand on each knee, like a man waiting in a barber’s shop” (Crane 183-184). This character is “the town’s marshal… a man known, liked and feared in his corner, a prominent person” (Crane 189). Alice Hall Petry thinks Crane was deliberate in choosing Jack Potter as the name for one of his characters (46). Petry says “the very blandness of his name stands in immediate contrast to what one would expect of a Texas marshal” (46). Jack’s last name “Potter,” suggests a “Potter’s Field,” which means “traditionally a graveyard fo...