The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane

The Red Badge of Courage consists of twenty-four chapters which follow the protagonist, young Henry Fleming, through his experience as a Union Army private during the American Civil War. Stephen Crane's internationally acclaimed work, The Red Badge of Courage, was published in 1895. Unique in style and content, the novel explores the emotions of a young Civil War recruit named Henry Fleming. What is most remarkable about this classic is that the twenty-four-year-old author had never witnessed war in his life before writing this book. Crane's story developed to some degree out of his reading of war stories by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the popular memoirs of Civil War veterans (Crane, 6-13), yet he also deviated from these influences in his depiction of war's horror. Critics have noted that his portrait of war is an intensely psychological one, blending elements of naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism. Indeed, he broke away from his American realist contemporaries, including his mentor William Dean Howells, in his naturalistic treatment of man as an amoral creature in a deterministic world.

For this reason, critical reactions to the The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 were mixed: some disapproved of Crane's use of the vernacular—the common slang of everyday folk and soldiers—and the impressionistic technique. Crane also experimented with psychological realism, and his venture into the realm of the human psyche radically changed the common perception of the novel in America. As he faces combat for the first time, Henry experiences an intense array of emotions: courage, anxiety, self-confidence, fear, and egotistic zeal. Interestingly enough, the naturalistic flavor of the work operates against this serf-important ego. The individual is not of primary importance, as is evidenced time and again in the words of Henry's mother, fellow soldiers, and officers. Henry is ...