The Red Badge of Courage

What books should everyone read before they die?Add Book

Stephen Crane

Literature

Aug 24, 2018

The Red Badge of Courage is an American classic and a landmark in the literature of war. Yet it is a book that is very easy to understand too quickly. Although it is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War, the novel offers little detail specific to the War Between the States other than the blue and the gray of the respective combatants’ uniforms. For all its naturalism and gritty engagement of the experience of battle, the book constantly reaches beyond its immediate realities to fulfill the author’s intention, as expressed in a letter to a friend, of writing “a psychological portrait of fear.” Although The Red Badge of Courage is deservedly praised for the groundbreaking realism of its depiction of a soldier’s experience, what’s most original about the book is its insistence on the primacy of what is going on in Henry’s head: That’s where the battle to become a man is fought, Crane’s tale suggests, and that is a battle that is never really won.

Add Reply