Power of Fear Exposed in The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, is a book based on a young soldier’s engagement in the Civil War. The psychological conflict that he faces throughout the story is both internal and external. The battles are fought in the reader’s face to show the young soldiers' conflict with himself, other soldiers, and the battle itself. With Stephen Crane’s amazing power of description, the reader becomes engulfed in the battle at hand and feels that the conflicts of the soldiers are becoming his own.
The main topic of the book is fear, and how it would affect a young man in a bloody war such as the Civil War. The war becomes the young soldiers worst nightmare, which gives him conflicting thoughts, emotions and fears. The young character soon realizes, as all of these things affect him emotionally and physically, that the war is very different from what he had hoped it was going to be. Although the soldier becomes nervous and even runs away at the Battle of Chancellorsville, he eventually returns to find that he and his fellow soldiers have grown. They had learned more about themselves then they had ever believed possible. The young soldier becomes a man with plenty of courage by the end of this book.
When we first meet Henry with his regiment, the 304th New York, he is bored and even lonesome, wishing to return to the farm. As time passes at the camp, Henry begins to realize that being a hero in the war may not be as easy as he had once dreamed. The inner conflict begins with Henry wondering about how he will react when the battle begins. He wonders whether he will run like a chicken, or stay a fight bravely. In the first battle Henry fights bravely, but as time goe...
... middle of paper ...
...en Crane also uses his powerful descriptions in the parts of the book where the character is fighting battles. He puts the reader in the face of the enemy and describes to them every last detail, making the reader know what every detail was like. If Crane had made the battles any less dramatic, the reader would have had a hard time following what Henry was having an emotional conflict about. Since Crane put you right there in the battle, you also felt the way that Henry felt.
Stephen Crane used the young soldiers inner and outer battles to give the reader a true idea of what the Civil War must have been like. The reader will visualize the battles, smell the gunpowder, hear the guns, and sense everything else that happens throughout the book due to Crane’s use of description. The reader even begins to feel and sympathize with Henry’s emotions and feelings.
In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming was drawn to enlist by his boyhood dreams. His highly romanticized notion of war was eclectic, borrowing from various classical and medieval sources. Nevertheless, his exalted, almost deified, conception of the life of a soldier at rest and in combat began to deflate before the even the ink had dried on his enlistment signature. Soon the army ceased to possess any personal characteristics Henry had once envisioned, becoming an unthinking, dispas...
To support his thesis he uses firsthand accounts on forms of diaries letters that were sent to the soldiers from home. He wanted to make sure that the readers would know exactly what the soldiers were feeling at that exact moment. He thoroughly illustrates what the common soldier was feeling and thinking as they fought the battle of the Civil War. One of the hardest and most important battles for America. I would totally recommend this book to another that is a must read for historian and avid
The important conflict in The Red Badge of Courage is Henry Fleming's. fear about how he will perform in his first battle. There were three people. who expressed their ideas about their fears before the first skirmish. They Henry Fleming, Tom Wilson, and Jim Conklin.
This type of novel is recommended for anyone interested in the Civil War. Not too many books explore the southern battles, especially from a Confederates soldier’s point of view. Bahr does an excellent job at capturing the essence of the Civil War and its affects on the people involved. The novel was nominated for several awards, earning the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gettysburg College, won the Book-of-the-Month Club, and was a New York Times Notable Book. The book showed some popularity and sold 10,000 copies, but was heavily overshadowed by another...
The main character of this book is Henry Fleming, mostly referred to as The Youth or Youth. The Youth has dark, curly brown hair also; he is a young teenager and is average height when compared to the Tall Soldier. Henry is insecure because he is going through a difficult stage between being a "man" and being a "boy". Henry can't wait to get to war when he signs up but during the book Henry learns that war has a lot of affects on people emotionally and physically. Henry's flaw is that he is afraid of making himself look bad and he is worried that he is going to be a coward and run away from battle. Henry really wants to be a "man" and be courageous. I once heard a swim coach give an extremely good definition of courage. He said "To me courage is not to be unafraid but it is to be afraid but one does it anyways and doesn't worry about being afraid. I think Henry thought of courageous as fearless and that is also part of his flaw.
For example, Henry’s actions in the second battle convey his initial cowardice. In response to the enemy coming back to fight, Henry “ran like blind man” (Crane 57). Henry’s actions illustrate his cowardice since he is afraid to stay and fight and flees instead. However, as Henry matures throughout the novel, he learns to control his fears and show courage through his fighting. For instance, in the battle after Henry rejoins the regiment, Henry “had not deemed it possible that his army could that day succeed, and from this he felt the ability to fight harder” (Crane 133). Henry portrays bravery in this battle, since he still fights with all of his strength, when he believes the enemy would win. Henry’s change from cowardice to bravery is conveyed through his act of running away from battle, to fighting courageously in
In the Red Badge of Courage, the protagonist Henry, is a young boy who yearns to be a Great War hero, even though he has never experienced war himself. Anxious for battle, Henry wonders if he truly is courageous, and stories of soldiers running make him uncomfortable. He struggles with his fantasies of courage and glory, and the truth that he is about to experience. He ends up running away in his second battle. Henry is somewhat nave, he dreams of glory, but doesn't think much of the duty that follows.
The proposed change project will introduce CPR training to the schools of Contra Costa County. By educating faculty, students, and parents about the benefits of performing CPR and providing basic CPR training tools, the 70% of people who feel helpless during a cardiac emergency will decrease. Using social media tools, like YouTube, allows a larger population to receive education. Overall, by allowing the project into schools, the number of people who are fearful and or unwilling to perform CPR will increase and thereby improve the chances of survival.
CPR involves breathing for the victim and applying external chest compression to make the heart pump. When paramedics arrive, medications and/or electrical shock (car...
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was one of the most powerful and infamous dictators of the 20th century. After World War I, he rose to power in the National Socialist German Workers Party, taking control of the German government in 1933. His establishment of concentration camps to inter Jews and other groups he believed to be a threat to Aryan supremacy resulted in the death of more than 6 million people in the Holocaust. His attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II, and by 1941 Germany occupied much of Europe and North Africa. The tide of the war turned following an invasion of Russian and the U.S. entry into battle, and Hitler killed himself shortly before Germany was defeated.
With Hitler thinking he could rule mankind he not only put Jews through what they went through but he also included other races he was also disgusted with homosexuals and hated them so he always put homosexuals through the stages of the Pick up, to the ghettos and to the concentration camps. Hitler and other high class men had many followers because Hitler was so passionate about what he said to the public and he was a strong smart man with a plan so Germans and his army felt uplifted of his plans and what he said. Hitler was so persuasive he changed the public’s opinion on the Jews and other people so many people joined the Nazis and followed Hitler in his reign of terror.
In the first part of the novel, Henry is a youth that is very inexperienced. His motives were impure. He was a very selfish and self-serving character. He enters the war not for the basis of serving his country, but for the attainment of glory and prestige. Henry wants to be a hero. This represents the natural human characteristic of selfishness. Humans have a want and a need to satisfy themselves. This was Henry's main motive throughout the first part of the novel. On more than one occasion Henry is resolved to that natural selfishness of human beings. After Henry realizes that the attainment of glory and heroism has a price on it. That price is by wounds or worse yet, death. Henry then becomes self-serving in the fact that he wants to survive for himself, not the Union army. There is many a time when Henry wants to justify his natural fear of death. He is at a point where he is questioning deserting the battle; in order to justify this, he asks Jim, the tall soldier, if he would run. Jim declared that he'd thought about it. Surely, thought Henry, if his companion ran, it would be alright if he himself ran. During the battle, when Henry actually did take flight, he justified this selfish deed—selfish in the fact that it did not help his regiment hold the Rebs—by natural instinct. He proclaimed to himself that if a squirrel took flight when a rock was thrown at it, it was alright that he ran when his life was on the line.
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...
Dorinne Kondo does an excellent job in her essay “Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self”in using the reflexive voice as a way in which to describe culture and break down the observer/Other dichotomy by giving agency and power to her informants. Not only does the anthropologist interpret the people, but the people give their interpretation of the anthropologist. She states:
When most people hear “First Aid” they think of the little white box with the red logo on it containing Band-Aids, gauze, tape, bug bite sticks, and antibiotic cream. However Webster’s Dictionary defines first aid as “the emergency care or treatment given to an ill or injured person before regular medical aid can be obtained”. That being said “First Aid” is not to be confused with “First Responder” whom is a trained paramedic who is able to administer CPR, medication, perform intubation, IV fluids, and a multitude of other medical tasks that any bystander or even a CPR certified civilian is unable to perform.