I love Stephen Crane. He reminds me of an American version of Franz Kafka.
His work is like a rhetorical question. Remember, he wrote AFTER World War I, so most Modernists and Naturalists believed that the world was changing, that people have gone nuts, and there is no order. When reading Crane's work, think of a Salvador Dali painting or a Biblical passage: ambiguous, and up to the reader to decide what he is saying.
