The Red Badge of courage

The Red Badge of courage is a story written by Stephen Crane. Stephen Crane was born several years after the end of the Civil War, so it is a bit odd he would choose to write about war and someones courage and fears. Crane must have either done a lot of research or even had some personal experience that no one ever knew about to write such a deep and toughing story. The Red badge of courage is a story about a man who wants to help his country. The man is headstrong and confident in his ability to march into war without fear or concern for his own well being. Once the battle starts and the man sees someone he knows die in front of him the man gets scared and starts to run the opposite direction. While he is running the wrong way someone in his army gets scared and thinks he is an enemy so he hit the main character in the head with the butt of a rifle (Crane). next the man is back home, everyone in his home town treats him like a hero because they think he was wounded in battle. He is given the Red Badge of courage, sort of like a purple heart, it is given to someone wounded while serving the military (Crane). The main character knows that he does not really deserve this award because he was hurt while he was being a coward and not saving people and being courageous like everyone thinks he was. The knowledge that he is a fake begins to eat at the man and he can no longer live with himself because of his guilt at being a coward and then being rewarded for it. So the man decides he is going to join the military again and he will be courageous this time so that he can become worthy of the medal he was given (Crane). Next the man is once again in a battle, this time though the man is to confident and to eager to prove his worth. So he does some very stupid things. First he sees that the flag, which represented the battle lines, was being pushed back. So the main character stupidly ran through the battlefield and attempted to move the flag forward but all he really did was mess it up even more by pulling the flag back more than it already was (Crane). Then the story got a little odd, with most stories like this you would expect for there to be a dramatic ending where the man either redeems himself by doing some courageous act or he would die in some foolish charge in order to prove his manhood, but in this story the main character just lives. He does not do anything spectacular, he just happened to live through the battle then it is the end of the story. Overall I thought the story was pretty good and kind of deep, I think it could have been a lot better than it was.

Crane, Stephan "The Red Bag of Courage." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffery D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw Hill, 2009. 493. Print.