Red Badge of Courage Book Report
The main point in The Red Badge of Courage is Henry Flemings
fear about how he will do in his first skrimish in the Civil War. Henry was a young man who lived on a farm with his mother. He dreamed about what fighting in a war would be like, and dreamed of being a
hero. He dreamed of the battles of war, and of what it would be like to fight in
those glorious battles. His mother was wise and caring. She did not want him to
go to war. She gave him hundreds of reasons on why he was needed on the
farm and not in the war. He didn't want to stay in the farm and do nothing, so he
enlisted in the miliatary.
After joining he found himself, with nothing to do. He became friends
with two other soldiers, John Wilson and Jim Conklin. John was an
obnoxious soldier, but he becomes one of Henry's best friends. Jim was tall, he was
a childhood friend of Henry's. They all were exiceted about going to war.
They started marching. After a few days Henry realized that they were
going around in circles. They just continued marching without a reason.
During this time Henry starts to think differently about war. He
becomes scared about running away from a battle. Lieutenant Hasbrouck, a
young lieutenant of Henry's regiment was an extremely
brave man. He, unlike the other officers, cared about and defended his troops
performance, and made sure that they got the recognition they deserved. He
was a true leader and Henry and John wanted to be just like him.
After a while, they finally discover a battle taking place. Jim gives Henry
a yellow envelope with a packet inside. He is sure that he will die, and says
that this will be his first and last battle. The troops manage to hold off the
rebels during the first attack, but the rebels came back again and
again with more reinforcements driving the soldiers back. Henry becomes scared,
confuse, and goes into a trance when he sees his forces backing down. He
finally gets up and starts to run like a "chicken", who has lost the direction of
safety. After he has run away he starts to think about his
actions.
At first he thinks of himself as a coward for running, and later he feels
that he was just saving himself for later. He thinks nature does not want him to
die, eventhough his side was losing. He believed he was intelligent to run, and
What did the man mean when he said, “Heʼd been ready to die and now he wasn’t going to and he had to think about that...This was not hiding in the woods. This was the last thing from that” (McCarthy 144)?
It is always said that war changes people. In the short story 'The Red Convertible', Louise Erdrich uses Henry to show how it affects people. In this case, the effects are psychological. You can clearly see a difference between his personalities from before he goes to war compared to his personalities after returns home from the war. Before the war, he is a care-free soul who just likes to have fun. After the war, he is very quiet and defensive, always watching his back as if waiting for someone to strike.
everyone else is running. He is the only one to admit to everyone that he is scared of fighting. He is also the only one not to run away from the first battle even though other people were. When Henry sees him walking in the road after the war, he has been shot and is hurt. Jim is afraid of
It appears that the war in Vietnam has still gotten into Henry. The war may be over in reality but in his mind it is still going on. This can explain all the agitations and discomfort he has such as not being able to sit still. Based on research, what Henry was experiencing was shellshock from the battlefield from the many soldiers being killed to t...
We learn that when Henry comes home from the war, he is suffering from PTSD. "It was at least three years before Henry came home. By then I guess the whole war was solved in the governments mind, but for him it would keep on going" (444). PTSD changes a person, and it doesn 't always stem from war. Henry came back a completely different person. He was quiet, and he was mean. He could never sit still, unless he was posted in front of the color TV. But even then, he was uneasy, "But it was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt"
...hermore, going to war was an act of cowardice. He had to put aside his morals and principles and fight a war he did not believe 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.
that he would not succumb to death from a man born of a woman. How he
teach him. When the woman realized that, she did what she had to do. She
life is gone. That to give up life is the coward's way. To his father,
he also realises that it is useless and so he fights on only to be
Henry suffers from retrograde amnesia due to internal bleeding in the part of the brain that controls memory. This causes him to forget completely everything he ever learned. His entire life is forgotten and he has to basically relearn who he was, only to find he didn’t like who he was and that he didn’t want to be that person. He starts to pay more attention to his daughter and his wife and starts to spend more time with them.
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.
...ter of live or die. I was in no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed me by. And it will always be that way.” This soldier realized that maybe he was the enemy and the other soldier was the hero. Everyone has questions of morality and normal heroes would not show the questions of morality.