The Red Badge Of Courage Analysis

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, which depicts thoroughly life during war in such a tremendous way, has been a masterpiece of literature and an outstanding success of its time. The novel introduces readers to the peculiar diversity of thoughts and emotions of soldiers and leads us to believe that war has a substantial influence on people’s maturity and transformation.
It can be seen from the character Henry Fleming, who at first was a mere coward filled with vanity and selfishness, that war has a significant effect on his improvement and attitude towards struggle. From the beginning of the novel, Crane stresses his flaming aspiration to be involved in battles due to naïve beliefs and unrealistic imagination. Henry regards battles …show more content…
The act of being “engrossed in his occupation” has transformed him, turned him into “what he called a hero”. His greed for reputation seems gone and he becomes a part of the rifle, he truly fights against what he despites, unconsciously but heroically. Then comes a brave moment when Wilson tells him goodbye but he says “just shut up” and that is when Henry decides he is going to survive, fight this battle and complete his duty. After all, he comes to realize that he could transcend his fears as he is presented with “a temporary but sublime absence of selfishness”. In the end, the youth feels contented and rejoices at the fact that he has been “where there was the red of blood and the black of passion and he was escaped” but continues to study his failures - the time when he fled, the time when he was too narrow-minded to distinguish between good and bad deeds. However, he is now capable of “looking upon failures in spectator fashion” and “criticizing them with some correctness”, it is observable that Henry has grown to contain maturity in his way of thinking and assessing deeds. He realizes his past