Topic > Essay on the Red Badge of Courage: Themes of Heritage and Color hills, at rest.As the landscape turned from brown to green, the army awoke and began to tremble with impatience at the sound of the voices. He cast his gaze upon the roads, which were transforming from long depressions of liquid mud to actual arterial roads - colored in the shadow of its banks, stretched to the foot of the army; and at night, when the stream became a sad darkness, the red glow, like an eye, could be seen through it , of hostile campfires set on the low peaks of distant lands" (Crane 1). The quote above is the opening paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. This very paragraph foreshadows the themes of color change and underlying messages, as well as the subtle idea of social heritage. Crane, through his detailed writing, depicts war as an ever-evolving psychological position as well as the evolving ideals of socially learned heritage. The novel opens with Henry Fleming in the field and recalling the path to his current condition within the war. Crane spends a lot of time chronicling the interaction between Henry and his mother as he prepares to leave to fight in the war, as well as questioning himself as a man. What is so interesting about this particular part, as it relates to the end of the novel, is that the American ideals of the creation of a man (hero) through war and war as beautiful are approached and questioned. Henry's mother is not happy. with his departure for the war. It warns him not only of the enemy but also of the men he will fight with. "He had, of course, dre... half of the paper... the flag, the reader can see both flags in color on a still black and white background. And finally, at the end, when Henry and his fellow men awaken to their victory, everything is in the color of hope. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage formed circles of the two themes of heritage and color By exchanging romance and deromanticism, Crane is able to create three hundred complete and sixty degree rotation of the ideas of manhood, heroism and attitudes of war (the floating colors). The novel opens with the question of warriors equaling men and heroes, and ends with the answer "On the river a golden ray of sunshine passed through the ranks of rain clouds" (Crane 183). Works Cited Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1992.
tags