Heroism in Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage Essays -- Red Badg

Heroism in Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage The world of Stephen Cranes fiction is a cruel, lonely place. Mans environment shows no sympathy or charge for man in the midst of a battle in The Red Badge of Courage Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden crop in the midst of so much devilment (89). Crane frequently anthropomorphizes the natural world and turns it into an agent actively working against the survival of man. From the beginning of The lax Boat the waves are seen as wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall (225) as if the waves themselves had murderous intent. During battle in The Red Badge of Courage the trees of the woodwind stretched out before Henry and forbade him to pass. After its previous hostility this new resistance of the forest filled him with a fine bitterness (104). More omnipresent than the mortal sense of opposition to nature, however, is the mortal sense of opposition to other men. Crane portrays the Darwinian struggle of m en as forcing one man against some other, not only for the preservation of ones life, but also the preservation of ones sense of self-worth. Henry finds hope for escape from this condition in the traditional notion that man becomes another thing in a battlemore selfless and connected to his comrades (73). But the few moments in Cranes stories where individuals swot above self-preservation are not the typically heroicized moments of battle. Crane revises the sense of the heroic by allowing selfishness to persist through battle. Only when his characters are faced with the absolute helplessness of another human do they rise above themselves. In these grim situations the characters are reminded of their more fundamental opp... ...erryman, John, Stephen Crane A Critical Biography. 1950. Rpt. In Discovering Authors. Vers. 1.0. CD-ROM. Detriot Gale, 1992. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations Stephan Cranes The Red Badge of Courage. newfangled Yourk Chelsea Hou se Publishers, 1987. Cody, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Revised Edition. Boston Twayne Publishers, 1980. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Logan, IA Perfection Learning Corporation, 1979. Gibson, Donald B. The Red Badge of Courage Redefining the Hero. Boston Twayne Publishers, 1988. Magill, Frank N., Magills Survey American literary works Realism to 1945. California Salem Press, Inc., 1963. Wolford, Chester L. Stephen Crane. Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Ed. Frank N. Magill. English Language Series. Vol. 2. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Salem Press, 1991