War is an experience that many would consider brutal, horrific, and even inhumane. It is however, a part of the fabric of humanity. It has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen as long as there are humans on Earth. In Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage, he depicts the time of the Civil War through the eyes of a young new soldier named Henry. Crane uses masterful imagery and figurative language to stimulate the reader’s imagination, but also to engage their mind as they envision the intensity of war and picture the reality of the circumstances. In order to do this, Crane portrays a variety of tones throughout the book, namely: paranoia, desperation, and intensity. These tones follow Henry as he follows the path of a soldier.
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...
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By using such literary elements as imagery and figurative language, Crane creates such tones as anxiety, exasperation, and ferocity as Henry learns what it is like to be a warrior. These tones serve to portray Crane’s image of war, but are expressed in such a way that they are not taken as fantasies of epic proportions, but rather a piece of what makes war such a deplorable experience. Crane is an artisan that shapes the image of war using similes, metaphors, and symbolism as the structure, and bringing it to life with descriptive language and color. The end result is like Picasso’s Guernica; a picture of civil war that is riddled with abstract and dark undertones, while portraying the realistic horrors of the battlefield.
Works Cited
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990. Print
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...
Events of crisis tend to reveal people’s true character, as well as help those people learn from the experience. Decisions people make during crises can display what kind of personality they have. In The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane, the youthful main protagonist, Henry, decides to join the army. In the beginning of the novel, Henry exhibits multiple cowardly qualities. However, through a series of battles, Henry learns more about himself and begins to become a remarkably brave soldier. Henry’s transformation from cowardice to bravery is portrayed through Henry’s change in thoughts, actions, and dialogue.
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.
Vivid imagery is one way with which writers protest war. Crane uses imagery to glorify, and shortly thereafter demean and undercut war, through the use of imagery, by placing positive and negative images of war close to eachother. “Blazing flag of the regiment,” and “the great battle God,” are placed before “A field where a thousand corpses lie.” (A) These lines’ purposes are to put images into the reader’s head, of how great war may appear, and then displaying that there are too many casualties involved with it. In Dulce Et Decorum Est, a man is described dyin...
Henry has the doubt that maybe when he goes into battle he might run away because he does not have enough courage. For example when the author says “No one seemed to be wrestling with such a terrific personal problem. He was a mental outcast” (Crane 19). The author is trying to express how Henry is a “mental outcast” by implementing that no one was going through the self-doubt situation that Henry was going through. Another example of how Henry is having internal conflicts is how Crane explains how Henry thinks he might flee during the battle because of his lack of courage: “There was a more serious problem. He lay in his bunk pondering upon it. He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle” (Crane 8). This quote perfectly explains what Crane means when he says the Henry was a “mental outcast”. Crane’s diction makes this the perfect sentence because it explains what Henry’s main fear was. This makes Henry a very low self esteem kind of person which has major internal conflicts and contradicts himself the majority of the time and makes for the perfect example of internal conflict by doubting on
The Red Badge of Courage uses both color imagery and color symbols. While Crane uses color to describe, he also allows it to stand for whole concepts. Gray, for example, describes the 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 Fleming's mental visions of battle. In the process, it gains a symbolic meaning which Crane will put to an icon like the "red badge of courage" (110, Penguin ed., 1983). Crane uses color in his descriptions of the physical and the metaphysical and allows color to take on meanings ranging from the literal to the figurative.
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.
Stephen Crane was a forerunner of the realistic writers in America after the civil war. His style included the use of impressionism, symbolism, and irony which helped credit him with starting the beginning of modern American Naturalism. Crane’s most famous writing is his war novel The Red Badge of Courage. He is also known for the novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and short stories such as “The Open Boat” or “The Blue Hotel.” “Crane utilized his keen observations, as well as personal experiences, to achieve a narrative vividness and sense of immediacy matched by few American writers before him (5). His unique style did not always follow a plot structure and focused on mental drama as well as external.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephan Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. New Yourk: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
He observed the poverty that dwelled in the neighborhood he lived through his neighbors and even himself. The continuation of the Civil War had not helped that poverty either as the United States fell deeper into debt as each day passed. Writers during this time wrote about the veracity of the Civil War and how horrific it was but the reader had trouble relating to the hardships of veterans unless they were a veteran themselves. Though the main literary technique in the time period was Realism, Stephen Crane was able to take the Realism of the Civil War and apply it to a young soldier fighting against his internal will. The character’s conflict with an outside force acknowledges an interpretation that Crane followed thoroughly on how outside forces control the human being and whether we “fight or flight” these battles, determines our fate as an individual or even as a species. This internal battle between the main character and these outside forces such as courage, fear, and pride, supported the Naturalism in the text. This combination of Naturalism and Realism in The Red Badge of Courage is what made so many readers question whether Crane had actually been in battle and is writing from
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.
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.
Analysis essay Along with many other critics, Joseph M. Meyer goes into great detail regarding debates surrounding the famous novel, “The Red Badge Of Courage”. In, “Henry’s Quest for Narrative In The Red Badge Of Courage,” Meyer asks readers, “Should we or should we not believe that the young soldier has in some way matured, or does Cranes permeating irony—along with Fleming's romanticized views of war—automatically make us skeptical of any insights that he may have gained about what it means and, after giving statements from another critic, leads readers to only agree, in a way, with Meyer's thesis. In his thesis, Meyer states that instead of considering his own preference he would rather consider all of the motives of the young soldier. This shows that he first
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.
Henry Fleming’s growth is demonstrated after the first battle when he becomes mentally stronger and surmounts his fear of being a coward. Henry Fleming is a romantic dreamer, inspired by visions of a chivalric type of warfare in which he becomes a mighty hero (Solomon). He reads of “marches, sieges, conflicts, and longed to see it all. (Crane, 4)” He never knows where he is going or what is expected of him until the order comes. As a “fresh fish” (Crane, 9), Henry must prove to the veterans and himself that he is not a coward although he is not sure how he will react in real combat. Henry does not have much self-confidence in himself and contains many of his fears in terror of being ridiculed. His insecurity causes him to be in the state of mental agony until he can prove that he is not a coward in the heat of the battlefield. In the first battle, Henry believes he has passed his test and is in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction. “So it was all over at last! The supreme trial had been passed. The red, formidable difficulties of war had been vanquished. (Crane, 45).” His delight with his actions can be seen when he begins to chat with his companions. There was a little flower of confidence growing within ...