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Crane's THE SERJEANT'S PRIVATE MAD-HOUSE.(Brief Article)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20000622
Author:SHAW, MARY NEFF

In "The Serjeant's Private Mad-House," a generally overlooked short story in Stephen Crane's collection of Spanish-American War stories, Wounds the Rain (1900), a group of forty U.S. Marines occupy an outpost in Cuba. Dryden, an American private on picket duty who appears temporarily to have gone "mad with fright," imagines that he sees "a reg-lar skirmish line" (173). Fearful that "they'd [the enemy soldiers] pepper me," Dryden refuses to follow Serjeant Peasley's demands to move to the rear. According to the narrator, a company of "formidable" and "mainly invisible" (177) ...

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