The Red Badge of Courage Blog

"The Red Badge of Courage" was a different story. The detail was so overpowering that the illusions the reader gets are so vivid. I found the story somewhat disturbing. The story starts out with this guy who is basically on a mission. His thoughts are veering off from him as he is in the Civil War. He is fighting when all of a sudden he gets hit in the back of the head. He was mistaken for the enemy and hit by someone of his own troop. His first act in the war was running because he was scared. He was a coward at first in this story and overcome by the powerful feelings that come with the war atmosphere. After he got hit in the head, many people thought he was wounded. He was not wounded with a battle scar, but by the mark of his own stupidity when he ran away from the fight rather than with it. When he starts to run again, he gets this overwhelming feeling. He runs into the fight, not really taking care of himself, and begins to shoot his rifle. He fires freely and many times, creating a cloud of smoke. As he emerges from this cloud of smoke, he now begins to feel foolish. He had just killed so many people by shooting his rifle carefree. His act of bravery though in this scene helped his troops though. So the Red  Badge of Courage in this story is the wounds he gets when he runs into the war firing his rifle at the oncoming people running towards him. The very last sentence is the most powerful line in the story because the part where it says "the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat," is one of those feelings that no one really gets to experience unless they are engaged in this war. 

I think that this story is not like the views of Henry David Thoreau because Thoreau believed that acts of violence were not necessary and that there was always some other way to solve the problem. Thoreau had more power in his words than he had in his actions. Stephan Crane, though, thought that violence was the answer in the end. When he completed his act of courage, even though he did not have that great triumphant feeling, he had helped someway in the war. I think the views are different mainly because of their outlooks on violence and when it is necessary to take action and when it is necessary to back off and just let things be.

Crane, Stephan. "The Red Badge of Courage." Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Douglas Fisher. New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2009. 492-93. Print.