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.
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.
Henry is somewhat naïve, he dreams of glory, but doesn't think much of the duty that follows. Rather than a sense of patriotism, it is clear to the reader that Henry goals seem a little different, he wants praise and adulation. "On the way to Washington, the regiment was fed and caressed for station after station until the youth beloved
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
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.
Henry’s motivation for being at war surely differs from Tim’s motivation for being at war. Henry’s thoughts give us insight into his motives as to serving in war; he doesn’t value the moral reasons for serving in the war. Instead, Henry is very motivated to acquire a praiseworthy reputation as a war hero. In order to boost his own self-esteem when running away from the battle, Henry actually criticizes and mocks those who decided to stay. Returning to camp, Henry lies about how he got the wound that he has. Henry continuously acts pompous, and acts as if he is entitled to praise for his war heroism. Later, though, Henry redeems himself when he is deeply involved in a battle, and explains that he no longer is seeking praise for his war efforts. He is then, ironically, praised for being one of the best in the regiment. Throughout the novel, we see Henry’s growth and how he actually learns from his mistakes. Tim O’Brien received a full scholarship to study at Harvard, when receiving a draft notice that he was selected to serve in the army. He, in contrast to Henry, decided to go to war because he didn’t want to seem weak in deciding to do otherwise considering that others such as Rat Kiley, Azar, Kiowa, and Sanders have already spent some time in Vietnam. He also is influenced to participate in the war because he believes that in doing so, he will be helping his family and
After Henry enlists in the army, he is afraid of what the future will hold, and is unsure of whether his strength will stay with him as fighting erupts, specifically, Henry is cynical of the soldiers who seem to be excited for war. Crane uses such elements of figurative language as metaphors to create a paranoid tone as Henry tries to find his character amidst the impersonal environment of war. “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 their faces. It was often that he suspected them to be liars. He did not pass such thoughts without severe condemnation of himself….He was convicted by himself of many shameful crimes against the gods of traditions.” (9-10). Henry feels threatened by the army he has enlisted in. He is not sure of how he must act or, more importantly, who he must be when faced with the insurmountable odds...
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 ...
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.
After finishing the novel, I felt relieved. The book was somewhat a bore and not as expected. While reading the book, I somewhat imagined my self in Henry’s place. During times of trouble, I tend to gain courage to do a reckless activity to make sure what must be achieved is complete. Henry during war, gained courage to go out ahead of the league and oppose a threat to his enemy even by risking his life. Although I could not risk my life like he had, going beyond ones expectations is what I would like to do.
In the two books A Soldier’s Heart and Red Badge of Courage there are few differences between the two. In fact, there are so many similarities that many people think one may have copied the other. Each of them explain the lives of two soldiers during the civil war, what they faced, and how they faced it. They encountered similar instances, but typically handled them in opposite manners.
Many of the soldiers who enlisted into the war discovered that their assumptions were completely amiss. To them, war was all about glory and exhilarating battles that they would one day be able to tell to their adoring families. Instead, they were confronted with death, fear and even some terrifying moments. Stephen Crane makes it known that the troops were never prepared for what the war was going to throw at them. Henry being one of these naive soldiers absolutely saw and experienced all the cruelties that resulted from this negative event in history. One of these harsh occasions in particular was when Henry witnesses the decease of one of his good friends Jim Conklin. After discovering that the soldier had been shot while in battle Henry starts to notice how pale and weak Jim was becoming. These symptoms then led to the fateful end of Jim Conklin’s life. Succeeding Jim's passing Henry remarks that he “desired to screech out his grief [and that] he was stabbed, but his tongue lay dead in the tomb of his mouth”(Crane 57). He then “threw himself again upon the ground and began to brood”(Crane 57). These quotes shows exactly how the reality of war played a part on Henry's emotions. From this Henry noticed and beared how truly horrific the civil war was. Now he viewed the war as dreadful and wretched all because of that one eye opening
This idea is the major framework. of The Red Badge of Courage, in which Henry Fleming aspires to be a man, a hero in the eyes of the masses by enlisting in the army. Henry's goal of the day. Returning a man from war has already marred his image of being a potential hero because his thoughts are about himself and not about the welfare of others. The.
Him obtaining a wound courageously is what made them respect Henry, and he knew that if they were aware that it was all an accident between regiment soldiers, he would no longer be viewed as a hero. What scared Henry was dying and being forgotten or dying a death not worthy of being heroic. He wanted to be known for his sacrifice and prove to the world that his individual life was worth celebration, and dying a significant death or being wounded in a courageous war effort was the way to do that, in Henry's eyes. In the same way that death needed to be purposeful, it needed to have substance in order to create Henry into a hero. "He finally concluded that the only way to prove himself was to go into the blaze, and then figuratively to watch his legs to discover their merits and faults ... To gain it, he must have blaze, blood, and danger, even as a chemist requires this, that, and the other" (Crane 115). Like a chemist needs to meet certain requirements in order to be a chemist, Henry knew that in order to be the hero he always wanted to be, his death must be filled with the necessary aspects, such as a blazing fire, blood, and danger. Without risk, his death could not have been heroic. Henry experienced many dead corpses and bloody wounds and saw the ways the world simply passed over them and
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.
Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage as Bildungsroman. In the Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, the main character Henry Fleming joins the army as a young fledging and ultimately matures to a courageous soldier ready for battle. The Red Badge of Courage is considered a Bildungsroman since the reader traces Henry’s development morally, psychologically, and intellectually. Henry progresses from a feared youth who, in the course of a couple of days, in the line of fire, has crossed the threshold to manhood.
Henry lacks experience and will not understand war until he steps into battle but until then he will be childish and curious. For example, when the narrator describes how Henry is thinking about the war he says, “For days he made ceaseless calculations, but they were all wondrously unsatisfactory. He found that he could establish nothing. He finally concluded that the only way to prove