In the novel The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephan Crane, the author uses symbolism to illustrate the main character’s actions and the setting’s scenery. Henry Fleming, the protagonist of the novel, cannot decide whether he can be a hero or if he will fall as a coward. The symbolism used in The Red Badge of Courage represents Henry’s decision to fight proudly and how common items mean more than what meets the eye.
Stephan Crane was born in 1871 in New Jersey. At the age of twenty-two, he published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Later on, Crane wrote sketches and short stories for newspapers in New York. It was not until his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, got published in 1895 that he became a well-known author. He died at the age of twenty-eight in 1900. He is one of the best-known American authors that wrote about naturalism. (Hafer)
Stephan Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage is about a vast decision that the main character has to face. Henry Fleming is a young man, referred to as “the youth” or “Flem,” that has just enlisted into the Union army. The novel first starts out as Henry’s regiment is resting on a riverbank. Rumors flow around the campsite
saying that they will soon move into battle. Once they do, the regiment starts to hear the distant sounds of the battlefront. It is Henry’s first battle and he is terrified. He asks his friend, Jim Conklin, if he would run away from the fight. Jim tells Henry that if the regiment runs, then he will run but if they stay, then he will stay and fight by their side. The regiment finally gets to the battle and starts to fight. After, Henry is proud and cannot believe that he survived his first encounter. After a short nap, Henry wakes ...
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...ng of courage (Ford 168-169) (Hoffman 129-131).
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. “ His War Book: Stephan Crane,” Last Essays: 1926. Rpt in TCLC. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
Crane, Stephan. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Tom Doherty, 1987.
Ford, Madox. “Stephan Crane: Symbolism,” The American Mercury: 1936. Rpt in TCLC. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
Hafer, Carol B. “The Red Badge of Absurdity: Irony in ‘The Red Badge of Courage’,” Bloom's Major Novelists: Stephen Crane: 2002. Infobase publishing.
Hoffman, Michael J. “From Realism to Naturalism,” The Subversive Vision: American Romanticism in Literature: 1972. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
Pizer, Donald. “’The Red Badge of Courage’: Text, Theme, and Form,” South Atlantic Quarterly: 1985. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
Hartwick, Harry. The Foreground of American Fiction. New York: American Book Co, 1934, p. 17-44 Rpt in Crane,
The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel: The Singular Love of Stephen Crane
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. United States of America, Chatham River Press, 1984. Print.
Henry Fleming is a eighteen year old boy who enlists into the war for romantic reasons. His mother tells him that he must face fear or run away. Henry’s friend, Jim Conklin purposes says that he’ll run away if fellow comrades do to. Henry thinks nothing of this but, nonsense. Fleming is apart of the Union in the 304th New York regiment. The first battle is a complete disaster but, the enemy charges again. Most of the union
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.
At the beginning of the novel Henry is disappointed with war; he had far greater expectations of war. He wants one thing out of this experience, Glory, and he would go to any extreme to fulfill it. In battle Henry acts impulsively and is easily manipulated, he flees from battle at the sight of others running. When he realizes his cowardice, he rationalizes without end why he ran. He justifies that nature also flees at the sight of fear when he scares a squirrel to runoff.
“The Red Badge of Courage” was written by Stephen Crane in 1985 as a fictional tale of a soldier of the Civil War. With its accurate depictions, readers were led to believe that Crane had at one time been a soldier. This was however not the case. Crane has a unique way of using themes and symbols in “The Red badge of Courage” to relay a very realistic portrayal of war.
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is a Civil War novel written in 1895. The novel tells the story of a young soldier who flees from the war, and subsequently is afflicted by mental anguish. Though the novel may be centered around the Civil War, the real war revolves around this anguish occurs in Henry’s head. From the onset of the novel, the protagonist tries hard to reconcile the mythological stories of past heroes arising from glorious battles with the ordinary and much less exalted experiences of his regiment. When presented with the knowledge that he may be moved to the front lines, Henry begins to deliberate over the war and glory he envisioned with the reality of the situation he is now in, and wonders if he’ll return ‘with his
Having read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and the exploits of Greek warriors, and, as well, longing to see such, Henry enlisted into the Union army, against the wishes of his mother. Before his departure, Mrs. Fleming warned Henry, "...you must never do no shirking, child, on my account. If so be a time comes when yeh have to be kilt or do a mean thing, why, Henry, don't think of anything `cept what's right..." Henry carried with himself this counsel throughout his enlistment, resulting in his questioning himself on his bravery. As a sign of Henry's maturation, he began to analyze his character whilst marching, while receiving comments from his brethren of courage in the face of all adversity, as well as their fears ...
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.
...erryman, John, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography. 1950. Rpt. In Discovering Authors. Vers. 1.0. CD-ROM. Detriot: Gale, 1992.
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.
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.
If it was not for Stephen Crane and his visionary work than American Realism would not have taken hold of the United States during the eighteen hundreds. During the years following the Civil War America was a melting pot of many different writing styles. Many scholars argue that at this time there was still no definite American author or technique. Up to this point authors in the Americas simply copied techniques that were popular in regions of Europe. Stephen Crane came onto the scene with a very different approach to many of his contemporaries. He was a realist, and being such he described actions in a true, unadorned way that portrayed situations in the manner that they actually occurred (Kaplan). He had numerous admired pieces but his most famous work was the Red Badge of Courage (Bentley 103). In this novel he illustrates the accounts of a Union soldier named Henry Fleming. At first the writing was considered too graphic and many people did not buy the book. Eventually the American people changed their opinions and began to gravitate towards Crane’s work. The readers were fascinated by the realistic environment he creates even though he himself had never fought in a war (Bentley 103). By spreading the influence of realistic writing Crane has come to be known as the first American Realist.