Red Badge of Courage: An analysis

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 t

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Simple changes from "He assumed the demeanor of one who is doomed, a-" to "knows that he is doomed, alone, to unwritten responsibilities" really grab the reader and put him into Henry's frame of mind. Crane's alterations emphasize Fleming's discomfort and uncertainty, anticipate his conduct in battle, and, by making his behavior more consistent before and after the flight, negate any possible growth in maturityà[therefore,] Crane inserted more detail to heighten Fleming's feelings of alienation early in the final manuscript and then increasingly isolated him after the flight from battle (Hayes, p. 297). Cox comments on this further, Closer textual analysisàreveals a need for considerable qualification of the cheerful indifference of Nature and of the 'decided growth in moral behavior' found in Henry Fleming's development. For the imagery suggests that this cheerful appearance of Nature is a part of its treacherous hostility (Cox, 209-10). Cox also comments that The noise of the battles, as Crane relates to us, are fitted to the universeàand the sun, though capable of appearing bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky, is ultimately red and responsible, as the cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins which goe
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Approximate Word count = 1623
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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