The Red Badge of Courage | Courage and Convention: The Red Badge of Courage
In the following excerpt, Breslin explains how Henry, though he at first flees from battle, matures into a soldier able to accept the "inevitability of death."
The Red Badge of Courage is a familiar book, and its genre is in part familiar as well—the tale of initiation, the adventure story. Crane himself meant it to be a popular novel, a potboiler to bring in money while he worked on more serious projects. But the novel does differ, almost startlingly, from other treatments of the Civil War in the same period, not so much by what it includes as by what it leaves out. The most striking feature of The Red Badge of Courage is the absence of any social context in which the fighting takes place. One could almost say that Crane...
[The entire page is 2820 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:
Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
Tell a friend about The Red Badge of Courage at eNotes.
