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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Chaos at the Well:
While Collins is sitting at the well in the middle of an ongoing battle, collecting water for himself and his comrades, Crane uses imagery to capture the chaos surrounding him, as seen in the following passage:
There was the blaring thunder of a shell. Crimson light shone through the swift-boiling smoke, and made a pink reflection on part of the wall of the well. Collins jerked out his arm and canteen with the same motion that a man would use in withdrawing his head from a furnace.
Here, Crane engages readers’ different senses in order to bring them more closely into the chaotic and violent battle scene. He helps readers to hear “the blaring thunder of a shell,” to see the “crimson light” shining through “the swift-boiling smoke" and making a “pink reflection” on the wall by the well, and to feel the frantic way that Collins “jerk[s]” his arm out of the well in the same way that a man would “withdraw his head from a furnace.”
Crane uses visceral and imagistic language here in order to communicate to readers the brutal reality of war. While there is a way in which his poetic language highlights the occasionally pleasant or awe-inspiring aesthetics of war (as seen in his descriptions of the “crimson light” and “pink reflection”), such language exists side-by-side horrifying depictions of the violence and destruction of the conflict.
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