In addition to being a famous book, it was also an interesting story, as the conflict was not just the war, but also the personal battle that was raging inside him. ( )

Although the language in this was very descriptive, I was disturbed by two things: 1. Stephen Crane had never been a soldier, so I felt that his descriptions could not be genuine (many write of experiences they have never had, but this — so detailed and ongoing, in the face of lack of personal experience — bothered me); and 2. there was never any point of confession of the protagonist's cowardly acts at the beginning of the novel, so I was left feeling like later valor was used to sweep that under the rug, rather than making a clean breast of it. ( )

I might have read this one for a high school book report, because it was a classic novel, maybe about the US civil war. Maybe there was something about a boat, though I can't really recall what happened. ( )

Great short novel on experience of Civil War battle. ( )

Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is the American Civil war from a soldier's perspective with the soldier in question being ex-deserter Private Henry Fleming of the Union Army. Crane was a product of the generation born after the Civil war but this works in his favor as he renders the conflict from an archetypal soldier's perspective who regrets enlisting in the first place.

From the onset we are pushed deep into gory and visceral scenes of dying men and wholesome slaughter-the purpose of which Fleming fails to grasp in his immaturity. He is, after all, a boy in a man's world and this justifies his rapid retreat in the face of what he believes to be eventual death at the hands of the Confederates. Ultimately, he relinquishes his cowardice to return to the front once more and this time leads Union soldiery to victory as an ensign with the Regimental standard.

But what essentially makes Crane's novel so relevant is that he doesn't mention the slavery question behind the civil war. In the entire narrative, slavery does not figure once. This has the insightful affect of heightening Henry's youth who emerges as a young man grasping for his own purpose in the world while dying for someone else's; an alien purpose which he doesn't even comprehend or care about.

I don't believe Crane to be a closeted pacifist. What he does in The Red Badge of Courage is make a stand against youthful vagaries in which young men offer themselves up as cannon-fodder in hunt for adventure but survive only as the scathed generation. What Crane would have made out of subsequent American imbroglios in Vietnam and recently Afghanistan is open to speculation. Based on his novel, I don't believe he would have castigated the purpose behind the wars. Rather, he would have firmly forewarned young potential soldiers-are you willing to endure the horrors of war?

We do not comprehend war until we witness it. Crane offers us a dynamic imagery of its sanguinary and visceral reality. Is glory in the field of battle worth it then? As William T. Sherman concluded, 'war is hell. Crane concurs. ( )