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Red Badge
Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage offers remarkable psychological insight into the experience of war. With vivid detail sparing nothing, Crane shows the reader the brutality of war. More importantly Crane shows how one soldier confronts his own mortality and fear. Although Red Badge of Courage takes place during the Civil War and the setting is striking, the novel centers on psychological conflict far more than social or political conflict.
What is most remarkable about Red Badge of Courage is that the author omits mentioning the political issues behind the war. The novel is not about the Civil War; it is about one man's character development. Although Henry fights for the Union, the author almost completely avoids any discussion about the political, economic, and social conditions that led up to the war and which surrounded it. The author keeps the political tone neutral, to allow all readers to see that Henry represents...
He knows he was not born a warrior and might shirk from the responsibility of battle. Indeed, when he is faced with his first real potential for death, he reacts as an animal might -- with flight rather than fight. This formative experience during the war traumatizes Henry almost as much as witnessing the rampant bloodshed and death all around him. Henry does not share the bellicose nature of many of his fellow soldiers, who do not seem to contemplate death in as serious a way as Henry. Not besieged by existential angst, Henry's fellow soldiers fight willingly and without much thought.
Henry is different. He "continually tried to measure himself by his comrades," and falls short (Crane, Chapter 2). The normative soldier is one who is ready to die at any moment; Henry remains interested in his self-preservation more than in the collective goals of the regiment. Whereas "young Hasbrouck, he makes a good off'cer. He ain't afraid 'a nothin'," Henry makes a relatively poor officer because he is afraid of everything (Crane, Chapter 4).
However, Red Badge of Courage is about character development. Crane offers insight…
Work Cited
Crane, Stephen. Red Badge of Courage. Digital version: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/73/73-h/73-h.htm
Red Badge of Courage and Nabokov on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" One of the easiest ways to understand how literature can implicitly function as propaganda in the service of the powerful is to imagine Henry Fleming, the main character of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage, if he had chosen to return home following his desertion rather than stay with the military. Crane's novel is a shameless piece
"The Open Boat" may have been based on Crane's real-life experience but it also functions as symbolic "of man's battle against the malevolent, indifferent, and unpredictable forces of nature…This reading is confirmed by the final irony of the death of the oiler, physically the strongest man on the scene and the one most favored to withstand the ordeal" (Rath & Shaw 97). The futility of resisting the power nature with
.. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. (Conrad 81) Crane thus suggests how the heat of battle becomes focused on a symbol, in this case the flag, and soldiers emerge from battle with this new symbol clearly in mind. The imagery used makes an association between the flag and a goddess, thus indicating a sexual appeal at the same time. Henry changes in
Red Badge of Courage and the Things They Carried both use the experience of war to highlight changes in the characters' self-perception and perception of the world. In both stories, the protagonists struggle with societal expectations and especially with normative masculinity, which is intimately linked with the experience of being in battle. Courage is a central theme in both stories, and becomes an elusive ideal for protagonists Lieutenant Cross and
Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until
He listens to his friend who says not to recall such thoughts. And Henry looks at the world at him in a different way. He now thinks of himself as a "man" who has gone through something horrible and survived. He moves toward the ray of sun. Not everyone agrees about the ending. Some think that it is positive, because Henry has been in war and learned how to accept it