The Red Badge of Courage Essay

A detailed Summary of The Red Badge of Courage Essay


The Red Badge of Courage is not a war novel. It is a novel about life. This novel illustrates the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Stephen Crane uses the war as a comparison to everyday life. He is semi-saying that life is like a war. It is a struggle of warriors-the every day people-against the odds. In these battles of everyday life, people can change. In The Red Badge of Courage, the main character, Henry Fleming, undergoes a character change that shows how people must overcome their fears and the invisible barriers that hold them back from being the best people-warriors, in the sense that life is war-they can be. Henry has a character change that represents how all humans have general sense of fear of the unknown that must be overcome.

In the first part of the novel, Henry is a youth that is very inexperienced. His motives were impure. He was a very selfish and self-serving character. He enters the war not for the basis of serving his country, but for the attainment of glory and prestige. Henry wants to be a hero. This represents the natural human characteristic of selfishness. Humans have a want and a need to satisfy themselves. This was Henry's main motive throughout the first part of the novel.


The character change in The Red Badge of Courage illustrates the conflicting nature of human instinct. The instinct wishes to serve itself, but it cannot serve itself if it is preoccupied with itself, such as in Henry's case. Henry's predicament in The Red Badge of Courage shows how he had to overcome his self-serving fear of death in order to accomplish the very same thing, surviving death. This is basic human nature. Henry's ordeal is a small look at how humans need to overcome the fear of what they are doing in order to function at maximum capacity at what they are doing. The battle of life is won by compensating for one's weakness by challenging and defeating that weakness, as Henry Fleming did in The Red Badge of Courage.

On more than one occasion Henry is resolved to that natural selfishness of human beings. After Henry realizes that the attainment of glory and heroism has a price on it. That price is by wounds or worse yet, death. Henry then becomes self-serving in the fact that he wants to survive for himself, not the Union army. There is many a time when Henry wants to justify his natural fear of death. He is at a point where he is questioning deserting the battle; in order to justify this, he asks Jim, the tall soldier, i

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Approximate Word count = 842
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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