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Heroism in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage
The world of Stephen Crane's fiction is a cruel, lonely place. Man's environment shows no sympathy or concern for man; in the midst of a battle in The Red Badge of Courage "Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment" (89). Crane frequently anthropomorphizes the natural world and turns it into an agent actively working against the survival of man. From the beginning of "The Open Boat" the waves are seen as "wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall" (225) as if the waves themselves had murderous intent. During battle in The Red Badge of Courage the trees of the forest stretched out before Henry and "forbade him to pass. After its previous hostility this new resistance of the forest filled him with a fine bitterness" (104). More omnipresent than the mortal sense of opposition to nature, however, is the mortal sense of opposition to other men. Crane portrays the Darwinian struggle of men as forcing one man against another, not only for the preservation of one's life, but also the preservation of one's sense of self-worth. Henry finds hope for escape from this condition in the traditional notion that "man becomes another thing in a battle"‹more selfless and connected to his comrades (73). But the few moments in Crane's stories where individuals rise above self-preservation are not the typically heroicized moments of battle. Crane revises the sense of the heroic by allowing selfishness to persist through battle. Only when his characters are faced with the absolute helplessness of another human do they rise above themselves. In these grim situations the characters are reminded of their more fundamental opp...
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...erryman, John, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography. 1950. Rpt. In Discovering Authors. Vers. 1.0. CD-ROM. Detriot: Gale, 1992.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephan Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. New Yourk: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Cody, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Logan, IA: Perfection Learning Corporation, 1979.
Gibson, Donald B. The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Magill, Frank N., Magill's Survey: American Literature Realism to 1945. California: Salem Press, Inc., 1963.
Wolford, Chester L. "Stephen Crane." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Ed. Frank N. Magill. English Language Series. Vol. 2. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1991
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty, and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.
The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel: The Singular Love of Stephen Crane
Macbeth first encounters the three witches when he is returning to Scotland after defeating his enemy Macdonwald. The witches discuss with Macbeth and Banquo what they can expect in the future. "FIRST WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! / SECOND WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! / THIRD WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! That thou shalt be a king hereafter! (I.iii.48-50).
1.) At first Macbeth sees a dagger floating, leading him to Duncan’s room, which existence he questions. After having murdered Duncan, Macbeth is jumpy and nervous, he imagines he hears things when they are owls. He also is afraid that he is damned to go to hell when he cannot say ‘amen’. He is afraid he will not be able to sleep in peace.
In Act I, the witches first met with Macbeth and Banquo to show them their futures as kings, thanes, and happiness. In Scene I, three witches appear and plan to meet with Macbeth and Banquo after battle, which proved to be true.
Magill, Frank N. Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Vol. 6. Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 1993.
Most of the press and readers were amazed at how he was vividly able to express and depict a war he had never seen through his use of symbolism and description in The Red Badge of Courage. The book’s success also gave instant recognition to Stephen Crane from newspapers such as the New York Times and the Philadelphia Press. Critics such as the New York Times London editor, Harold Frederic, applauded The Red Badge of Courage for shaping future American literature by saying, “Crane’s journalistic description and ironic understatement compromise a stylistic legacy which has descended through Hemingway and early Mailer and done a great deal in shaping American literature as we know it”
Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, combines realism and naturalism to depict the deadly confrontation of men in war. The use of these traits uniquely exhibits Crane's talent to express characters, to describe setting, and to create a theme. The use of naturalism is quite dominant, but realism is also present and used to great effect.
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was a novel that exploited an underlying irony of the nature of the American Civil War and war itself, as it was the “first non-romantic novel of the Civil War to attain widespread popularity.” Rather than depicting soldiers fighting for some noble and important cause, like literature of the American Revolution, Crane painted what seemed to be “loosely cohering incidents” that demystified and reshaped his generation’s views on warfare. War was not dignified; it was “hard stuff. Men ran away howling. Bodies were strewn and torn. War, went the cliché, was hell.” Crane created characters and scenes that highlighted the problems of his America’s popular opinion of war for “those whose interests are most nearly touched.” In Crane’s novel, those people were the innocent young soldiers who were thrown into “hell” and bestowed with responsibilities and expectations of highly immoral standards. He showed his generation and generations of Americans to come the horrors and the true nature of war. By exposing the fears and inner thoughts of Henry Fleming in his new environments, Crane introduced America to the harsh reality that “the blue and the gray honestly don’t ever seem too entirely certain why they’re fighting each other.” These were merely young men killing each other without really understanding the reason.
Three witches come into scene with sounds of thunder, as well as flashes of lighter. These three witches are together to figure out when they are going to meet with Macbeth. They eventually agree to meeting Macbeth at sunset once the battle has concluded.
The witches talk to animal sprits and talk about what they have been doing. One says that she was killing swine (Diseases of cattle were believed to be caused by witchcraft in Shakespeare’s day.) Another says that she will punish a sailor. The third witch says that she will help her to do it. They were all doing cruel things. Soon they would do a cruel thing to Macbeth which would end in his ruin and downfall. The witches await Macbeth on the heath, boasting of there powers.
...play I seem to feel, underneath the mirth and nonsense, a terrible hatred of mass opinion, a fervent faith in the individual's right to live”(Garland 56). “One of America’s most influential writers, Stephen Crane, produced works that have been credited with establishing the foundations of modern American naturalism. His civil war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage,” realistically depicts the psychological complexities of battlefield emotion and has become a classic of American Literature”(“Stephen Crane”
Gibson, William M., ed. The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Prose and Poetry by Stephen Crane. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950.
Baym, Franklin, Gottesman, Holland, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
If it was not for Stephen Crane and his visionary work than American Realism would not have taken hold of the United States during the eighteen hundreds. During the years following the Civil War America was a melting pot of many different writing styles. Many scholars argue that at this time there was still no definite American author or technique. Up to this point authors in the Americas simply copied techniques that were popular in regions of Europe. Stephen Crane came onto the scene with a very different approach to many of his contemporaries. He was a realist, and being such he described actions in a true, unadorned way that portrayed situations in the manner that they actually occurred (Kaplan). He had numerous admired pieces but his most famous work was the Red Badge of Courage (Bentley 103). In this novel he illustrates the accounts of a Union soldier named Henry Fleming. At first the writing was considered too graphic and many people did not buy the book. Eventually the American people changed their opinions and began to gravitate towards Crane’s work. The readers were fascinated by the realistic environment he creates even though he himself had never fought in a war (Bentley 103). By spreading the influence of realistic writing Crane has come to be known as the first American Realist.