*1. "Something new." "Never been guessed before." "A very fresh note." The critics agreed there was something different going on here. Many books about war, some quite realistic, had already been written.
Describe what was fresh in Crane's approach to writing about war. Crane's approach to writing about war was fresh for a number of reasons. First being his writing style. Throughout the novel, Crane uses very vivid imagery and incredibly imaginative metaphors and similes to compare the fantastical scenes of battle - which most readers cannot quite conjure up - in a way that makes it seem real and understandable. He describes things by using specific descriptions that are crafted to draw a reader's sense of comparative understanding. Readers
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Contrast it with the following excerpt (written in the first person) from "Chancellorsville," a first-hand account of the battle from the Confederate point of view, from Chapter VIII of Reminiscences of the Civil War by John B. …show more content…
Early's division held this position, and my brigade the right of that division; and it was determined that General Early should attempt, near sunrise, to retake the fort on Marye's Heights, from which the Confederates had been driven the day before. I was ordered to move with this new brigade, with which I had never been in battle, and to lead in that assault; at least, such was my interpretation of the order as it reached me. Whether it was my fault or the fault of the wording of the order itself, I am not able to say; but there was a serious misunderstanding about it. My brigade was intended, as it afterward appeared, to be only a portion of the attacking force, whereas I had understood the order to direct me to proceed at once to the assault upon the fort; and I proceeded. As I was officially a comparative stranger to the men of this brigade, I said in a few sentences to them that we should know each other better when the battle of the day was over; that I trusted we should go together into that fort, and that if there were a man in the brigade who did not wish to go with us, I would excuse him if he would step to the front and make himself known. Of course, there was no man found who desired to be excused, and I then announced that every man in that splendid brigade of Georgians had thus declared his purpose to go into the fortress. They
Nevertheless, an attitude they show is their cause for engaging in the war. On page 110, Lee describes, “With every step of a soldier, with every tick of the clock, the army was gaining safety, closer to victory, closer to the dream of independence.” His words reveal that their reason for coming was to gain their long overdue independence. Without a cause worth fighting for on each side, the war would have no fuel or reason to continue. In like manner, another attitude of the South was their admiration for their commander general. On page 251, Longstreet proclaims, “Colonel, let me explain something. The secret of General Lee is that men love him and follow him with faith in him. That’s one secret.” I believe this clarifies that the bond of brotherhood and respect for each other in this army would allow for these soldiers to follow their leader blindly. The overwhelming amount of faith and trust among the Army of the Northern Virginia is inspiring. The Confederates prove in these appearances that they do indeed have an important cause that they are willing to die
The novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara depicts the story behind one of the bloodiest, and highly significant, battles of the American Civil War, the battle of Gettysburg. The battle consisted of 51,000-casualties between the Union and Confederate army forces. Mainly focused on letters, journal entries, and memoirs, Shaara tells the story of Gettysburg by using characters from both sides of the war. The characters chosen grasp the divergent views regarding the impending days of the war, and countless numbers of those views develop throughout the novel. Such views come from the Confederates own General Lee and General Longstreet, and the Unions own Colonel Chamberlain and soldiers from both sides. From those depicted
The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel: The Singular Love of Stephen Crane
In the next pages I will explain why Fredericksburg was such a tragedy. Why it was a big morale booster for the South, but a disappointment for the North?
Bravery can be showed by having strength, being willing to sacrifice, and standing up for yourself and others. Life will not be very fun if you do not try to make it fun. One has to be brave to make life fun. If one is not strong it would make it hard to be brave. If Holling was not strong then he would not have been able to play Ariel in the Shakespeare play. All of his friends showed up when he was was wearing yellow tights and feathers on his butt. He stayed strong and finished the play. “Still ringing in the hands of Danny Humfer, Meryl Lee and Mai Ti who were standing in the very front row.” (Schmidt 86) That moment was when Holling first saw all of his classmates watching him in the play. At first he only saw Danny’s parents, but then
The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen…you will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and string us to death. It is unnecessary. It put us in the wrong. It is fatal. –Robert Toombs. (Boerner paragraph 2).
In John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began, the quote from David Seabury “Courage and convictions are powerful weapons against an enemy that depends upon only fists and guns”, is evident throughout the novel with the character’s various successes. Conviction (willpower) is very strong in the main characters, as the stakes are high with their entire town invaded leaving very few free. This conviction is also essential for courage, which as Ellie explains in the book, can only be found amidst fear. “I guess true courage is when you're really scared but you still do it” p.25. There are various frightening moments in this book, like when the ride on mower was used like a bomb or having to rescue Lee using heavy machinery. These are all moments the characters used their will to survive to propel them to do something that they were terrified to do. The characters also face daunting themes head on despite the previous stress. This is courage, found within conviction, and it has proved to be a good weapon against those with physical weapons.
Before long, the retreat of the Union Army turned into a complete rout. It was impossible to stop the retreating soldiers from heading all the way back to the Potomac River. In the midst of the flight were hundreds of sightseers from Washington, including six senators and ten Congressmen. We called them cowards, denounced them in the most offensive terms, put out our heavy revolvers, and threatened to shoot them, but all in vain; a cruel, crazy, mad, hopeless panic possessed them, and communicated to everybody about in front and rear. The heat was awful, although now about six; the men were exhausted; their mouths gaped, their lips cracked and blackened with the powder of the cartridges they had bitten off in the battle, their eyes starting in frenzy; no mortal ever saw such a mass of ghastly wretches."
The novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara depicts the story behind one of the most significant and bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg consisted of 51,000-casualties between the Union and Confederate army forces. Mainly focused on letters, journal entries, and memoirs, Shaara tells the story of Gettysburg by using characters from both sides of the “spectrum”, the Confederate and Union army. These characters grasp the revolving points of view about the impending days of the war. Such points are casted from characters, as the confederates own General Lee, General Longstreet, the Unions own Colonel Chamberlain, and soldiers from both sides. From those depicted in the novel, with several
The descriptions of war that he read in magazines were usually dry and too matter-of-fact. He also believed that they lacked connection to the real emotions that are brought about by warfare; “dates and locations of battles cannot even begin to reproduce the essence of combat” (“Naturalism”). Due to his yearning to learn more and provide a realistic representation of war, Crane researched many aspects of the battlefield and often referred to scenes he wrote about as “skirmishes on the football field” (“Biography of Stephen Crane”). Ultimately, Crane “saw the opportunity to craft the first novel that explored warfare from the point of view of the psyche” and he “attempt[ed] to show that humans were not designed to commit such atrocities on each other”
The Transformation of Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane's purpose in writing The Red Badge of Courage was to dictate the pressures faced by the prototypical American soldier in the Civil War. His intent was accomplished by making known the horrors and atrocities seen by Unionist Henry Fleming during the Battle of Chancellorsville, and the conflicts within himself. Among the death and repulsion of war, there exists a single refuge for the warrior--his brethren.
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...
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.
Kaplan, Amy. “The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision of History”. Bloom, Harold ED. New