By Paris White, Top Honors Student

Susitna Valley High School

Talkeetna

Score 974

The Red Badge of Courage gained its popularity and prestige through the fact that it was not a typical war book. It pulled no punches, held nothing of the truth back from its pages. That was its strength, but inevitably a point of outrage for some of the people that read it. The veterans of the war were offended by the lack of glorification and romanticism that is usually found in most war novels. Though not a typical war novel, the Red Badge of Courage retained a sting of truth which affronted veterans of the Civil War with its intense descriptions of both the physical and mental battlegrounds which they faced.

Veterans of the Civil War were put off by the explicit nature of the description of the battles included in the book. It was not glorious, as it instead showed the unglamorous aspects of the war; it depicted disease and dying, fear and desperation. The survivors of that collective experience were reminded all too soon of the pain that they had faced, and they were terrified of it. More importantly, they were terrified of other people sharing that knowledge.

The Red Badge of Courage differed from others before because it addressed the psychological issues that were a constant burden to the soldiers who dealt with them, and exposed them to the public. They faced guilt, fear, loneliness in intense situations that few other people had ever experienced, much the less understood. After the war they returned to wives and children that were unable to relate to the violence they had dealt with day upon day, week upon week, year upon year. Their history during the war became their own private experience, one that they shared with their comrades. The idea of their families being able to see like that into their psyches was no doubt disturbingly personal and had the potential to raise the demons that they had managed to store away inside themselves.

The veterans of the Civil War were angered by the Red Badge of Courage because they were afraid recollection and too war-weary to want to recall the hardships they had faced. War is something that has been glorified throughout history. Humanity has painted scenes of golden battlefields and shining uniforms, valiant expressions and poses. It has covered up the aspects of war that are hard to address: murder and brutality. Only during war do nations condone the purposeful killing of another person; during all other times of history we try to forget that those things ever occured, that they were ever commited. Stephen Crane forced a post-war society to face the events that had occured, in their actual state. His remembrance of the conflict, unmarred by the blur of sentimentality, was all to real to its readers. Those that had been witness to the events shook their heads; those that had not been merely shivered.

The book Red Badge of Courage ventured into territory that very few of its genre had even looked towards. It gave people that had never encountered war a new insight into the hearts and minds of the soldiers who had been imprinted permanently with its violence and destruction. It gave society as whole a view into their minds, and redefined what makes a good war novel. Instead of idealization, society started to value the truth instead. Though it was a blow to the collective subconscious of the veterans of the Civil War as a reminder of their indescribable experience, it was a necessary reminder of the evils of war, unembellished, unedited, uncensored.