Red Badge of Courage
Henry Fleming enlists as a youth with heroic fantasies of battle lingering in his mind and walks off the "place of blood and wrath" three days later a serene veteran of battle. He came from hot plowshares seeking a Homeric Iliad, timid and anxious about his potential and what others think of him. He ponders a great dilemma: will he run from battle? He is reassured after asking the tall soldier his question. His friend tells him that he would do what the rest of the regiment was doing. Henry is not an individual yet, he is a fragment of a mass of men. Henry feels as though running from the backlash of the first skirmish he fought was a great debacle, and he is further tormented when the tattered soldier asks him how he got his feigned wound. He is haunted by pangs of guilt. As he participates in more battles, the opposition grows more and more human, as opposed to the monsters he envisioned them to be earlier. He sees them as human when he experiences his first surge of fierce, animalian anger. Henry's epiphany occurs in the following "battle". He discards the expectations of his peers and declares his individuality and courage by seizing the flag from the dead color sergeant and waving it before the regiment. He risks death as the
During war, a soldier's most important support system is his/her regiment. This is a support system that Henry has, then loses throughout this time period in his life. All through the war Henry questions his courage and bravery. He wonders if he will turn and run when death is looking him in the eyes, or if he will decide to stay and do what he came to do; prove that he is a man and can handle even death itself. During battle several soldiers are wounded earning their "red badge of courage" and Henry's confident, Jim Conklin, dies. Here is where Henry's second isolation, the isolation from his regiment, occurs. The soldiers in the regiment feel a certain pride and respectability from earning their "red badge." Henry didn't earn this sense of pride and respectability because of the abandonment of his fellow soldiers. He felt that his assumption was clearly rectified- he was a coward. Henry Fleming seemed to become the virtuoso of separation, individualism, and isolation. The tension is eased after he mistakenly "earns" his "red badge" from a friend. easiest of targets and thus displays his courage and strength. The seizing of the flag is Henry's ultimate rite of passage. He discards the terrified and cautious youth he enlisted as and becomes a mature, courageous adult. His reach for the flag proves he is as brave and courageous as the warriors whose stories dazzled him as a boy. Henry and Holden began both their stories weaker and more ignorant than they left them. How are their rises to maturity similar and different? Both stories cover a time period of about three days. The three days are greatly important, as they detail the rite of passage from youth to maturity. Such a prodigious
Some common words found in the essay are:
Badge Courage, Homeric Iliad, Henry Holden, Henry Fleming, Fleming Throughout, Salinger Crane, Badge Courage's, Jim Conklin, Rye Holden, red badge, henry fleming, red badge courage, Red Badge, badge courage, youth maturity prodigious, catcher rye, rite passage, maturity prodigious, pride respectability, youth maturity, seizing flag, earning red badge, earning red,
Approximate Word count = 1146
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
