 Race is a polarizing theme throughout the story . As William M. Morgan wrote , while the white characters are largely depicted as cold and humorless , and the black characters as warm and amusing , the town 's racial hierarchy is omnipresent . Slavery is referred to several times throughout the story , as critic Nan Goodman noted ; as a post @-@ Civil War work , The Monster revisits slavery 's legacy , as well as its effects on modern African Americans like Henry Johnson . At the beginning of the story , it is made clear that the white townspeople tolerate Henry because he " behaves himself " and " knows his place " as a black man . Later , when Henry struggles through the burning house to save Jimmie , it is said that " he was submitting , submitting because of his fathers , bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration . " However , while his suffering is tantamount to the story , Henry Johnson is never really fleshed out as a character ; before the fire , he " strikes in quick succession the minstrel 's poses of an old @-@ time , happy @-@ go @-@ lucky Negro " , who charms children and women alike . Despite his heroism , Morgan stated , Henry does not stray far from a racial stereotype . Critics such as Lillian Gilkes and John R. Cooley have noted Crane 's lack of racial sensitivity while writing The Monster , although they note that the author was simply exhibiting " unconscious racism " in order to fulfill literary conventions of the late 19th century . In his 2002 essay , " Blunders of Virtue : The Problem of Race in Stephen Crane 's ' The Monster ' " , John Clemen sums up the critics ' tendency to either " ignore the evidence of Crane 's racism , to dismiss it as a cultural influence irrelevant to his larger purposes , or to reconfigure it within his irony in such a way as to enable the story and its author to achieve an unintended racial insight . " 
