Essay Questions

How does Crane use juxtaposition to link the story’s opening and closing lines in pursuit of the story’s dominant theme?

The story opens with the image of a train “rushing forward” with a “dignity of motion” on which the town’s sheriff, Jack Potter, is arriving with his new bride. The final line of the story describes the exit of the lawman’s hardly terrifying nemesis Scratchy Wilson as “His feet made deep tracks in heavy sand.” The imagery juxtaposes a wealth on pertinent information. The fast, industrialized force of the relatively new technological invention of the train is pitted against the absolute ancient means of slow bipedal locomotion. The strong, sensible “Jack” versus the undignified “Scratchy” not simply in terms of personality but their very names. The upsetting of the convention western mythos” a married sheriff and a bumbling nemesis in the climactic showdown at high noon. All this juxtaposition is laid bare in the opening and closing lines to contain a story that is about how the wild west was tamed and domesticated.

What 1950’s Oscar-winning western film almost seems to be a deconstruction of the irony of this story so that it is more befitting of the conventions of the frontier myth?

Crane’s story is about the ending of the myths of the wild west as everything becomes more domesticated and the wildness is controlled. The locomotive meant that those moving west from east no longer needed to be quite as adventurous as their precursors. The civilizing aspect of genuine law and order is expressed paradoxically by Jack Potter’s neither needing nor choosing to strap a gun to his side. The marriage itself is replicated in the film High Noon which is about a stoic sheriff bringing his beautiful young bride back to town and expected to maintain order through the barrel of his gun—all alone at that. The wife in this story is neither young nor beautiful and the “showdown at high noon” is hardly the stuff of classic western confrontation between the forces of good and evil. High Noon tales a story shockingly similar at the level of basic foundation yet subverts every single ironic subversion that Crane brought to his deconstruction of the myth.

This short story stands alongside The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel to cement Crane’s reputation as a master in the art of color imagery. What is the significance of its title?

The first couple of pages of the story are obsessed with time and movement. The train is rushing away from the big city (relatively) of San Antonio to the wilder environs of Yellow Sky. Jack informs his wife that they are due in his small town to the precise minute: 3:42 PM. Her reply informs the reader that it is currently 12:17 PM. Everything is moving forward in time as the train heads west, attempting to outrace the sun, but destined to be doomed in this goal.

When is the sky most often described as yellow, in the early morning hours of dawn or closer to sunset at dusk? Later in the day, even later than 3:42 PM, in fact. Whether referenced as sunset or dusk, the sky is at its most yellowish right before twilight. In fact, the precise astronomical term—derived from navigation, a subject with which Crane was famously familiar—for the period of the day when the sky is most likely to be described as yellow is “civil twilight.” Yellow Sky may be presented as less the past within the construct of the western mythos, but it is really the future. Even the astronomical terminology is devoted to Crane’s theme of the civilizing of the west in the twilight of its frontier days. In this frame of reference, the time setting of High Noon is yet another aspect of the film which seeks to subvert Crane's irony.