Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, is perhaps one of the foremost literary achievements of the modern era. Red Badge has created a niche based upon its powerful images of war, such as the example thusly cited above. Crane had a definite ability to take the image from the page and create the picture within the mind of the reader. The other more striking quality of the novel is Crane's ability to illuminate the crosshair between picturesque in the novel and its ethical aspects. As one reviewer of the novel stated at the time, Crane had the ability to sort of take the drama of war as witnessed within the mind of one central man and then admit you to a seat within the theatre.
Red Badge was actually the second novel of American born Stephen Crane. His first was entitled Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It, too, received accolades within the time it was written for achieving literary naturalism. Most publishers turned Crane down considering his work's realism too ugly. He actually published the descent of the slum girl into prostitution under a pseudonym. While ignored by readers, it won strong admiration ...