The Red Badge Of Courage Essay

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Recommended: Narrative personal experience of war

War is “an immense and terrible machine,” (Crain). In the nineteenth century, the effects of the Civil War were still taking place. Soldiers were living with the trauma that was caused by the war. With their experiences, many authors wrote war stories that heavily influenced the era of literature. Those authors focused on the war and the sentimental aspects, romanticizing everything. However, Stephen Crane was the one of the first authors in this era to accurately depict the real aspects war had on a soldier. In composing The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane wanted to show the real effects of war on a soldier because of his love and curiosity of war and the military. Years after the Civil War, Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, …show more content…

Crane was obsessed with old Civil War memoirs from The Century magazine. Feeling like something was missing, he soon wondered exactly how those soldiers felt. This curiosity caused him to write The Red Badge of Courage. An abridged version of the novel was sent out to newspapers all throughout the country in 1894, and the full length version followed only a year later. Setting the book in the Civil War, Crane wrote so vividly about the experiences and emotions of a soldier. Some reviewers thought he was writing from first-hand experiences because of his exemplary attention to realistic detail. Though he did not have military experience, Crane said that he took inspiration from his “rage of conflict on the football field.” However, he centered the realism of his book on “psychological rather than photographic.” One critic said that “he stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man,” (Crain). Crane was able to capture the internal conflict of being a coward or being a hero. By focusing on the psychological war within the soldier, Crane’s novel was set apart from other war stories of the time, (“The Red Badge”). Because of Stephen Crane’s interest, the whole country was now interested in the life and mind of a soldier at

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