Through the use of imagery, diction, and tone, Crane depicts the man in the maroon-colored flannel shirt as an isolated, irrational, and violent actor whose desire for control causes him to lose his sanity after the inability to do so. Desperate for confrontation, the man arrives at a lonely, Mexican village in seek of a challenge. He cries inhumanly loud to solicit a duel, yet his invitation is met with silence and stillness, which “formed the arch of a tomb over him. [His] cries of ferocious challenge rang against walls of silence” (crane). This description indicates the futility of his cries and solicitations. By comparing silence and stillness to a tomb in the opening paragraph, Crane suggests that silence and stillness are the man’s weakness. A tomb’s natural association with confinement and inevitability relates …show more content…
Among this chaos, a resting dog is scared and attempts to escape only to be stopped by his pistol shots. Threatened and “fear-stricken, the dog turned and flurried like an animal in a pen [while] the man stood laughing” (crane). By evoking the image of an animal in a pen, Crane presents the dog as helpless and domesticated. The diction reinforces this, with words like “fear-stricken” showing the extent of the dog’s terror. This control over the dog causes the man great pleasure prompting him to laugh since he has fulfilled his previously insatiable desire for control. This also antagonizes the man, portraying him as irrational and needlessly violent man due to his enjoyment from the abuse of the dog. Soon, his desire for control becomes unsatisfied again, and ultimately he reaches “the deepest rage over the immobility of a house. He fumed at it as the winter wind attacks a prairie cabin in the North. To the distance there should have gone the sound of a tumult like the fighting of two hundred Mexicans”