What is so interesting about Crane's Red Badge of Courage? I found out that war turns boys into mature men, the real dialect and slang used during the war, and what it's like to be a soldier in the Civil War.

The whole novel covers only two days in the life of Henry Flemming, the main character. In that amount of time, war can turn a boy into a man. It does not physically turn an individual into a grown man, but it mentally matures them. War matures boys into a men is by experiencing new, unpredictable environments and adjusting to unfamiliar smells, sou

By utilizing the soldiers talking in a dialect that was common during the war and using slang to represent certain words reflected the authors' emphasis on realism and descriptiveness. In fact, the way they talked was in broken English. They spoke with a strong accent depending where they were from. Some of the dialog and slang that stood out to me were "a jimhickey", which is defined as a superior example or an excellent soldier. "I swan!" is defined I swear. "You've been jawing", is you've been talking nonsense. "Too much chin music" is too much babbling. "Toddy-stricken" is to be drunk. "Yeh blamed infernal" or you old devil. "The first volley" is the first burst of gunfire. "Fresh fish" is rookies. That is the way soldiers talked at the time during the war. Different from today, but today's society has their own slang and dialect that is similar. I know how the soldiers talked and acted because from the author's technique of writing. This is the first paragraph of the book. It is a great introduction of the novel to show how the author writes descriptively and how he can create a mental picture in the mind:

There was shootin' here an' shootin' there, an' hollerin' here and hollerin' there, in th' damn darkness, until I couldn't tell t' save m' soul which side I was on (p.136, Crane).

Soldiers get frustrated and there are a lot of sarcastic remarks exchanged. By doing so there are grumbling and mumbling:

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from

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Approximate Word count = 1172
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)