War is a mandatory action crucial to obtain peace in dire circumstances. Civilizations falter and crumble due to disagreements inside the system. In order for peace to prevail, war becomes a necessity, to avoid the reversion and waning of improvements or else all struggles and achievements will amount to nothing. By giving reason and name to war, it is transformed into a fair, yet morally inaccurate solution to find peace. This indistinct finale to the fiasco reflects how in order to succeed in one situation; one must sacrifice and sin for the better and more desirable outcome. A person fights for reasons concealed to themselves, but are exposed in sacred revelations broadcasted publicly during the dissection of character. Reasons for enlisting and wanting to fight differ from man to man and conscious to conscious. In The Red Badge of Courage, Crane explains the realism of war and the literal (as well as implied) effects on men with impeccable accuracy. Crane emphasizes upon accusation, insanity and honor of war. He is fully able to expose the true nature of war, but above all, the changes in a man who has witnessed it. War has progressed to act as a shield for actions. It substitutes as a force field for any activity that a person is unable to explain. Under the circumstance that the shield should fail, a soldier becomes unstable. A soldier begins to crumble, and so the action they would turn to is blame. Even though they are still guilty by association, they do everything within their power to clear their name from the dark slate of fault. In The Red Badge of Courage, Crane shows Henry breaking in stages. By revealing Henry’s thoughts, Crane’s narration adopts an accusatory tone: And there were iron laws of tradition and ... ... middle of paper ... ... text assist in creating a hostile and unstable tone. The ‘strange plants’ and ‘peculiar blossoms’ create an unfamiliar scene of nature that does not seem natural. The steps taken away from those of his comrades are the direct results of his reclusive state. Crane states the ‘gloom’ of the night and how subconsciously he tried to keep his distance from others. The solitude that compels Henry’s open aversion flirts with the fine line of reality. The use of uncertain words like ‘weird’ and ‘satanic’ help develop the essence of a more dark and mentally disturbing descent into madness. Lingering effects of the faraway flames bore the pleasure of casting shadows over Henry’s dark thoughts. The burden of watching the distorted figures, evil and foreign to him, Crane uses the macabre imagery to illicitly manufacture the miniscule seeds of doubt and suspicion inside Henry.
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...
What is most remarkable about Crane's series of letters to Mrs. Crouse is the tone of his love-stricken entreaties. He gracefully plays off of his burgeoning fame and his growing success as a published artist with good-natured self-deprecation and a propensity to undermine his own endeavours. The series of letters commences with a carefully constructed communique crafted to provoke a sympathetic response from Mrs. Crouse. Employing "inside" reactions to his celebrity to impress, he relies on an aura of exotic settings and playful humor to win a reply. Having succeeded in securing an apparently satisfactory response, he eagerly raises the temperature of the correspondence in his second letter. Without compromising further relations with Mrs. Crouse, his words adopt a more acute degree of intimacy, with Crane even going so far as to volunteer to accept her literary advice.
Events of crisis tend to reveal people’s true character, as well as help those people learn from the experience. Decisions people make during crises can display what kind of personality they have. In The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane, the youthful main protagonist, Henry, decides to join the army. In the beginning of the novel, Henry exhibits multiple cowardly qualities. However, through a series of battles, Henry learns more about himself and begins to become a remarkably brave soldier. Henry’s transformation from cowardice to bravery is portrayed through Henry’s change in thoughts, actions, and dialogue.
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.
In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane explores the theme of courage and heroism in depth. He develops these themes through the main character, Henry Fleming. Henry is a naïve young man faced with the harsh realities of war, in this book, some argue that Henry is transformed into a heroic "quiet manhood" while others see Henry as the same young man who ran from battle in the beginning of the book. I think Henry doesn't change, his heroic status acquired at the end of the book isn't truly him, instead he merely is motivated by fear of dying and being rejected by his fellow soldiers.
There are four main themes to me in “The Red Badge of Courage.” These themes are courage, personal growth and maturity, self-preservation, and nature. The theme of courage is what this story is all about really. What is courage? Who has courage? I want courage. How does one obtain courage? This is what Henry wonders and eventually figures out after having a misunderstanding of what bravery and courage was to begin with though. “His self-pride was now entirely restored. In the shade of its flourishing growth he stood with braced and self-confident legs, and since nothing could now be discovered he did not shrink from an encounter with the eyes of judges, and allowed no thoughts of his own to keep him from an attitude of manfulness. He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man” (Crane 78). Henry feels that because the other men are giving him praise, then he is right in his behavior. But is this courage? Absolutely not. As Henry marches from battle, the reader is led to believe
Stephen Crane begins a new course of realism in The Red Badge of Courage. Many critics point to him as one of the first American authors of a modern style, and The Red Badge as a fine example of this. The novel is built on a coming-of-age theme, and many of its descriptive elements, such as its concentration on nature and character's actions, are in the realist style, most popularized in America by William Dean Howells and Frank Norris. However, Crane's style in this book has some slight differences from earlier styles. The narrator does not name the characters. In the first chapter, we discover the names of Henry and Jim only through their dialogue with other characters. The narrator only refers to them by descriptors‹"the tall soldier" in Jim's case and, most importantly, "the young soldier" in Henry's case.
In the Historical fiction, “The Red Badge of Courage”, written by Stephen Crane; a young man try’s to find courage in himself in the time of war. After watching your commander die in war, would you stay and fight or return home and be a coward? Enlisting Himself into war Henry, to be more than the common man to prove worthyness and bravery. With the sergeant dead will Henry lead his men to victory, or withdraw his men in war. Not being the only are faced with the decision Jim and Wilson Henry’s platoons will have the same decision.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
The Red Badge of Courage is not a war novel. It is a novel about life. This novel illustrates the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Stephen Crane uses the war as a comparison to everyday life. He is semi-saying that life is like a war. It is a struggle of warriors—the every day people—against the odds. In these battles of everyday life, people can change. In The Red Badge of Courage, the main character, Henry Fleming, undergoes a character change that shows how people must overcome their fears and the invisible barriers that hold them back from being the best people—warriors, in the sense that life is war—they can be. Henry has a character change that represents how all humans have general sense of fear of the unknown that must be overcome.
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...
113-117. Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephan Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Cody, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Revised Edition.
As a “fresh fish” (Crane, 9), Henry must prove to the veterans and himself that he is not a coward, although he is not sure how he will react in real combat. Henry does not have much self-confidence in himself and contains many of his fears in terror of being ridiculed. His insecurity causes him to be in the state of mental agony until he can prove that he is not a coward in the heat of the battlefield. In the first battle, Henry believes he has passed his test and is in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction. “So it was all over at last!
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, one of the most significant and renowned books in American literature, defies outright classification, showing traits of both the realist and naturalist movements. It is a classic, however, precisely because it does so without sacrificing unity or poignancy. The Red Badge of Courage belongs unequivocally to the naturalist genre, but realism is also present and used to great effect. The conflict between these styles mirrors the bloody clash of the war described in the book – and the eternal struggle between good and evil in human nature.
The Red Badge of Courage, by it’s very title, is infested with color imagery and color symbols. While Crane uses color to describe, he also allows it to stand for whole concepts. Gray, for example, describes both the literal image of a dead soldier and Henry Fleming’s vision of the sleeping soldiers as corpses and comes to stand for the idea of death. In the same way, red describes both the soldiers’ physical wounds and Henry’s mental vision of battle. In the process, it gains a symbolic meaning which Crane will put an icon like the ‘red badge of courage’. Stephen Crane uses color in his descriptions of the physical and the non-physical and allows color to take on meanings ranging from the literal to the figurative.