The Red Badge of Courage
By Stephen Crane
Read by Anthony Heald
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Following its initial appearance in serial form, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was published as a complete work in 1895 and quickly became the benchmark for modern anti-war literature. In Henry Flemming, Stephen Crane creates a great and realistic study of the mind of an inexperienced soldier trapped in the fury and turmoil of war. Flemming dashes into battle, at first tormented by fear, then bolstered with courage in time for the final confrontation. Although the exact battle is never identified, Crane based this story of a soldier’s experiences during the American Civil War on the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville. Many veterans, both Union and Confederate, praised the book’s accurate representation of war, and critics consider its stylistic strength the mark of a literary classic.
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Summary
Summary
Following its initial appearance in serial form, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was published as a complete work in 1895 and quickly became the benchmark for modern anti-war literature. In Henry Flemming, Stephen Crane creates a great and realistic study of the mind of an inexperienced soldier trapped in the fury and turmoil of war. Flemming dashes into battle, at first tormented by fear, then bolstered with courage in time for the final confrontation.
Although the exact battle is never identified, Crane based this story of a soldier’s experiences during the American Civil War on the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville. Many veterans, both Union and Confederate, praised the book’s accurate representation of war, and critics consider its stylistic strength the mark of a literary classic.
Editorial Reviews
Editorial Reviews
Reviews
Reviews
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Good, But Something of a Museum Piece
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The whole point of this book—the reason why it ranks so high in the American Literary Pantheon—is that it was written to give us a soldier’s-eye view of combat.
Reading back issues of the Century Magazine in the early 1890’s, Stephen Crane was struck by two things: first, most of the articles in the magazine’s Battles and Leaders series were written by the leaders, not the men in the ranks. Second, Crane wondered, “that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps!” And so America’s first Naturalistic novel was born.
And so, as a kid I was repeatedly urged to read The Red Badge of Courage. Of course I never did. But I retained the impression that the book, above all others, recreated the external experience and internal struggles of the man in the ranks. And for years I also retained a lingering sense that I had dodged a serious cultural obligation.
Thanks to Downpour I’m finally free of my impression of the book and my guilt over having dodged it for so long. Let me explain.
Having spent the intervening years reading soldiers’ diaries, letters and memoirs, along with campaign studies that drew heavily on even more diaries, letters and memoirs, I’m pretty familiar with the motivations, thoughts and self-reproaches of the men on both sides. For decades now, writing history “from the bottom up”, (as well as “from the inside out”, analyzing motivations as much as actions) has become so commonplace that the pendulum has actually begun to swing back, with some historians reasserting the importance of leaders their actions. Still, the focus of academic and popular history has been Crane’s focus: the thoughts, feelings and actions of the common man. So The Red Badge of Courage, which came as a revelatory thunderbolt to readers in 1895—a mere 30 years after Appomattox—struck this listener as somewhat less thunderous and revelatory. Crane’s book is to some extent the victim of the literary genre he helped create.
Not that he doesn’t tell a good tale and get the details right. After all, he was working from deep reading as well as first-hand recollections of veterans. There’s a soldier upset at the prospect of a Big Move because he’s just put a new wooden floor under his tent. A rumor started by a friend of a friend who knows a guy attached to the divisional headquarters guard. The man in the firing line only able to guess at the battle to his left, right and rear. And, of course, the whole question of what Civil War soldiers called, “Seeing the Elephant” (combat). Crane handles this deftly, never alluding to the soldierly slang but, as battle approaches, letting his hero’s mind slip back to the feelings he experienced as a young boy waiting for the circus to roll into town.
Still, and understandably, Crane also gets things wrong. Even among raw recruits the question of whether a Big Move was on could be settled quite easily: were orders issued to cook three day’s rations? A small detail, but the rumor launches the story, as well as an almost endless argument that rings a little false. Also, if Henry Flemming’s first battle is Chancellorsville—and everyone, from veterans to modern scholars agree that it is—then his encounter with a moldering Union corpse in the woods couldn’t have happened; the armies had never met in those woods before. Yes, the corpse is there for powerful artistic purposes and yes, this is a work of art, not history. But the question of how it got there is awkward.
Anthony Heald does a fine job with the book, though sometimes Crane’s sentence structure and late-Nineteenth Century word choices make rewinding necessary. And sometimes, (I’m thinking particularly of his “hot ploughshares” passage near the end) in his attempt to clothe the inexplicable in words, Crane takes off in flights of language almost as inexplicable, without moving us any closer to understanding.
Details
Details
| Available Formats : | Digital Download, Digital Rental, CD, MP3 CD |
| Category: | Fiction/Classics |
| Runtime: | 4.68 |
| Audience: | Adult |
| Language: | English |
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