The Red Badge of Courage, S. Crane

The Red Badge of Courage by S. Crane
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The war novel authored by Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, reveals a story of a young soldier Henry Fleming who was in a private union army but fled far from the battle field. Triumph over his disgrace, Henry longs just for a declaration, ‘a red emblem of courage’ in order to do away with his fear (Pizer, 1990). This story starts as soon as Fleming enters the battlefield. Despite the fact that we come across bits of flashbacks, the main part of this stage gives Henry’s desires mixed with some fears about the awaiting battle. Henry at a point gets to the heat of battle, whereby there is some emotional conflicts for Fleming as the major character of the story. First, he must be able to work out the contradiction between his continued existence alive and his longing to become a true soldier. When Henry is shot by one of his colleague, he pretends to have been shot by an enemy. Henry’s worry is whether he will successfully get to the next stage of the battle without being discovered (Bloom, 1987).
He nearly fights to death and encounters his foes in a face-to-face battle. He overcomes his fight for survival because of his strength, though not great enough in regard to his likeliness to win the battle. With all the challenges, he finally comes out of the battle not only alive but also with a new lease of adulthood. In his inner thought, Fleming feels transformed at the ending phase in the story. He is internally convinced to face his weaknesses and learn from his past failures and weaknesses, rather than having the thought of whether these weaknesses are real to him. The story comes to the end in a positive mood with Henry becoming a new man who is also a hero far from the nervous boy in the start of the story, (Gibson, 1988).
While this story is set at a time in history when there were many wars, the novel stretches to reveal some complex internal struggle of the main character rather than bringing out the battle events. This leaves the readers without a clear indication of whether the book was in support of against war. By lacking the political, military and geographic information of the war, the story is separated from its historical perspective. This is due to lack of war dates, the place of war and the war name. All these omissions direct the expected attention of the story from its historic setting and rather focusses on the emotional fighting of the main character, (Gibson, 1988).
In conclusion, the story reflects the experience of a central character, who runs away from his internal world and breaks loose to express his maturation and heroism, with mixture of no fear. The story shows the inner impression of Henry Fleming told in the third person point of view. In addition, the book’s style could be said to be natura...