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The emotional effects of war on soldiers
The theme in the red badge of courage
The theme in the red badge of courage
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Recommended: The emotional effects of war on soldiers
In the Historical fiction, “The Red Badge of Courage”, written by Stephen Crane; a young man try’s to find courage in himself in the time of war. After watching your commander die in war, would you stay and fight or return home and be a coward? Enlisting Himself into war Henry, to be more than the common man to prove worthyness and bravery. With the sergeant dead will Henry lead his men to victory, or withdraw his men in war. Not being the only are faced with the decision Jim and Wilson Henry’s platoons will have the same decision.
With Jim and Wilson by his side, Henry and his men with different outlooks on the war will fight and be the ideal team. Being the youngest of three men Henry desires honor along with a high reputation and will let nothing stand in his way. Jim was pragmatized about war. If the other soldier's were going to fight he was going to fight with them. Being classified as the "Loud soldier" and transitioning to a more mature man, Wilson undergoes many trials. These hardships show him the true meaning of life and how insignificant his life when there are other lives in the mix. As war wages on these men will fight for their own personal cause's and together will strive for a victory.
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May 6, 1863 the setting take place in the chancellorville, during the Civil War.
Not only was the war bloody and violent but also the soldier's had to deal with bad weather, poor clothing and malnutrition. This particular setting is important to "the red badge of courage" because the book is about courage and bravery. To fight in these harsh conditions you must be courageous and brave. Many times Henry wanted to back out and he did once he found courage in himself and he fought till the very end. Without Henry's courage he would not of been able to overcome this
battle. Overall the Red Badge of Courage was about a young man named Henry. Going off to find himself off in war. Signing up for war and having death being a possible outcome cannot be easy. When Henry is faced with war he drop’s his gun and runs like a coward. While running from war Henry meets a soldier tattered man and has an altercation, resulting in Henry getting hit in the head with a rifle. Finding his way back to war Henry and his friend Wilson lead 304th regiment to a victory seizing the enemy’s flag. The next battle there is a tramatic loss Henry loses vision in his courage. One of the last battles Henry fought in him and his friend capture four men even though there wa a significant of lives lost. Marching toward the river with his remaining troop’s Henry looks back on his war experience with a change of heart. Henry feels guilt for all the bad he has done and realizes the universe is truly a beautiful place. In the conclusion this book was overall interesting and insightful. I enjoyed reading about the civil war. The many encounters Henry and his platoons had it gave the reader a inside look of what it would have been like fighting living in the Civil war time period. The main lesson I learned is that you should never be scared to face your fears and to live everyday to the fullest. Henry coped with his fears of the war and eventually overcame it. With a little bit of effort any fear can be overcome.
The hero of The Red Badge of Courage, which was written by Stephen Crane in the late 1800s, was a young private named Henry Fleming, who was fighting for the North in the American Civil War. Like Pip, in Great Expectations, Henry was a commoner. He was new to the Army and few people knew his name. The main difference between Henry and the earlier heroes is that Henry was not born with leadership qualities or traits like bravery. In fact, in the first battle he fought, he proved himself to be a coward by running from it.
In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming was drawn to enlist by his boyhood dreams. His highly romanticized notion of war was eclectic, borrowing from various classical and medieval sources. Nevertheless, his exalted, almost deified, conception of the life of a soldier at rest and in combat began to deflate before the even the ink had dried on his enlistment signature. Soon the army ceased to possess any personal characteristics Henry had once envisioned, becoming an unthinking, dispas...
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.
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, Stephen Crane explores the theme of courage and heroism in depth. He develops these themes through the main character, Henry Fleming. Henry is a naïve young man faced with the harsh realities of war, in this book, some argue that Henry is transformed into a heroic "quiet manhood" while others see Henry as the same young man who ran from battle in the beginning of the book. I think Henry doesn't change, his heroic status acquired at the end of the book isn't truly him, instead he merely is motivated by fear of dying and being rejected by his fellow soldiers.
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.
All in all The Red Badge of Courage contains a perfect illustration of internal conflict, symbolism, and characterization. All of this devices help teach the readers that courage does not mean a lack of fear, true courage means having the guts to confront the fear. Stephen Crane does a beautiful job of explaining and breaking down the facts in how Henry started being a character which had deep fear and finished being a “man of courage” by having the guts to go into battle even
Henry had received his red badge of courage, though not in the manner Henry had hoped for*. In the opinion* of Carol B. Hafer, a critique of Red Badge, Henry’s red badge is nothing but “a badge of shame or absurdity” (Hafer 1). Since Henry receives his red badge from a fellow soldier than the enemy, his red badge is nothing more than a mark of ridicule. Furthermore, Hafer writes, “had Henry remained fighting with his regiment instead of deserting, he would have known the outcome of the battle and would have had no need to block the retreating soldier to obtain the news” (Hafer 1). *** Despite, Henry’s shame-ridden red badge, he is satisfied he now has a story for his desertion. Later into the night, Henry makes it back to his regiment’s camp and manages to hide his shame. The following morning, Henry and the regiment are once again thrust into the heat of battle. To Henry’s surprise, he manages to fight through the whole day and not retreat. As said by the lieutenant, “heavens, if I had ten thousand wild cats like you I could tear th’ stomach outta this war in less’n a week” (Crane 46).
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, 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.
In the Red Badge of Courage, main character Henry Fleming, is faced with many obstacles and tough situations that he must deal with. Nature and the physical environment around Henry, play a big role in the decisions that he makes, the actions that he takes and the re-evaluation of lifes values he later takes.
Henry, Wilson, and Jim are similar in many ways but they also have many differences. They are all soldiers who chose to fight for their own reasons. Each of them goes through theirthere own journey of self discovery when they enter battle. They have to decide if they are willing to stay and fight for what they believe in or if the will coware and run out of fear.
In the novella, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, the youthful protagonist, Henry Fleming, enlists himself in the Union Army, with the hope of attaining his fantasies of prestige. Soon after his enrollment in the army, the reality of his decision settles in. He begins to realize that he had put himself in a life or death situation, without even thinking twice. Now the adolescent is faced with the tension and anxiety of being either a coward or a hero in battle. In the excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming can be viewed as an ignorant teenager because he does not carefully think about the harsh reality of being a soldier before he enlists himself the Union Army.
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 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.