The Red Badge Of Courage

Cranes THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

In certain ways, Stephen Cranes The Red badge of Courage is concerned more with a later American generation forgetting the Civil state of war than with a realistic picture show of how that war was actually fought from the cipherpoint of the common soldier. Such forgetting paradoxically occurs through the way Americans rememberedâ€"and continue to rememberâ€"the Civil War: the emphasis of major campaigns won or confounded or, to handling the title of a text regarded as one of Cranes major sources, on battles and leaders of the Civil War. The Red Badge, of course, obfuscates both battles (is the crack Chancellorsville?) and leaders (Flemings army superiors go unnamed except for MacChesnay, an vague regiment colonel). The major cause of the war also is or so forgotten, perhaps, because of middle-class, post-Reconstructionist sentiments; the only sign of it appears with the negro teamster who sits mourn entirey down to lament his neediness of an audience (Kaplan 277). In Cranes novel, even the warring parties have lost their political specificity, being reduced in cultural recollection to visual metaphors, the blue and gray armies, as if mere figures in a game.

One can regard such forgetfulness as a duplication of Cranes general vision of epistemological solipsism.



In the novel Fleming never knows what his fellow soldiers are thinking (His tribulation to discover any mite of resemblance in their view points made him more miserable than before [2:428]) or, from one outcome to the next, how to regard his desertion. Critics continually debate the issue of his growth, arguing all that he achieves it or, relying on manuscript evidence, that Crane frames his protagonists own star of growth (He felt a quiet manhood, unassertive but of sturdy and strong blood [24:538]) in an ironic light. How, then, can a later generation fully valuate the social struggles that an earlier one experienced?

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