In the story The Red Badge of Courage by stephen crane the author develops the theme by using the characters thoughts and actions. The author conveys the theme, people often doubt themselves when facing a great challenge.
The narrator begins the story with a young soldier laying in his bunk. The narrator starts with “He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” The soldier is having conflicting Thoughts about fighting. He is trying to prove to himself that he will not run even though he is scared.
The soldier still having conflicting thoughts about war he uses his imagination to see a battle. The narrator states, “ As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities.” He is having trouble
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He needs reassurance that maybe he's not the only one.
The older soldier replies with “ I've thought it might get too hot for Jim Conklin in some of them scrimmages, and if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s’pose I’d start and run. But if everybody was a-standing and a-fighting, why, I’d stand and fight. Be jimmy, I would. I’ll bet on it.” From what Jim is saying it is giving the young soldier a little more confidence. He is becoming reassured in his abilities to fight.
In the final paragraph of the excerpt the narrator states “ His emotions made him feel strange in the presence of men who talked excitedly of a prospective battle as of a drama they were about to witness, with nothing but eagerness and curiosity apparent in there faces. It was often that he suspected them to be liars.” He has come to the reality of war he is still afraid but his mind has accepted war. With him listening to the other soldiers talk of war seeming unafraid he thinks that they are all just liars because it seemed as if he were the only one that was
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty, and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.
talks about how he will not run and take on the whole army on by himself.
To contrast truth and fiction, the author inserts reminders that the stories are not fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact. O'Brien's most direct discussion of truth appears in Good Form. He begins with, "It's time to be blunt," and goes on to say that everything in the book but the very premise of a foot soldier in Vietnam is invented. This comes as a shock after reading what seems to be a stylized presentation of fact. In the sequence of Speaking of Courage, followed by Notes, O'Brien adds a second dimension of truth to a story so vivid that the reader may have already accepted it as the original truth.
Later in the book, he again reflects on the war. He catalogs the proofs that he has been given — injured and half-starved countrymen — but persists in his existential doubt. He notes, “So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering. Yet we had no proof of it. In fact, we had even less than no proof; we had had thrust into our faces the very shabby and unavoidable obverse of proof…” (94). Because he has not seen the battles, he has difficulty acknowledging the reality of war.
...suade the reader to think or feel a certain way but this in itself is another lie. Telling a true war story is about convincing someone of the inconvincible, to make them believe the unbelievable. That's why a series of half-truths and exaggerations are each a small part of the truth. The truth is an enigmatic cloud, a mystery; at its very core is truth. This truth can never be obtained, only hinted upon. The ideas that make up this cloud are each different yet circle a similar theme, which is the real truth. Some of these concepts may be at opposite ends and completely dissimilar but are each a part of the truth. Therefore each may be independently untrue, but the coalescence of these fabrications is in essence the only real truth.
The difficult association between the occurrence of war and storytelling is told through the eyes of Tim O’Brien; he explains that a true war story has a supreme adherence to offensiveness that provides a sense of pride and courage commonly found in storytelling. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and im...
Works Cited and Consulted: Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Canada; 1976. Gibson, Donald B. The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero.
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.
Gibson, Donald B. The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
In the beginning of the short story, the young boy is already imprinted with the ideas of war from his father. His father was a former soldier who “had fought against naked savages and followed the flag of his country..” (Bierce 41). The image of war that is imprinted on the young boy from his father is that of nobility and righteous that comes from war.
This opening paragraph is a simple, poetic version of the main theme behind All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The point of the story is to show that war is not romantic, glorious, or fantastic. In fact, those words could not be further from the truth. War is a disgusting competition of human instinct, fought by the wrong people. It brings out the worst in everyone; it destroys their compassion, honesty, and ideals. The beginning chapters of All Quiet on the Western Front are devoted to showing that warfare hardens soldiers against true emotions. Their main priority is survival, second is comfort, followed by gain.
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.
War brings out a side of people they may never have been aware of beforehand. This side is darker and scarcely guided by morals. This in the two texts “The Man I Killed” by Tim O’Brien and “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy. In the first text, the main character, Tim, as well as the reader, is plagued with vivid descriptions of the dead man’s corpse. In the second text, the main character mulls over the idea that if the situation had been anything else, things would have gone differently, which sets up his hesitancy in his action of killing his enemy.
The short story “The Veteran” by Stephen Crane has many techniques such as dialogue, imagery, and setting to show how even in war a soldier can be afraid, but one’s strength can show later in life when the