from "The Red Badge of Courage" - Stephan Crane

from "The Red Badge of Courage" is a short passage that is describing a man who gets really mad. It is about this man who is doing something and then for some reason, we do not know why, gets extremely angry. We then find out the steps he takes and what he turns into once he is angry. "Presently he began to feel the effects of the war atmosphere - a blistering sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack like hot stones. A burning roar filled his ears. Following this came a red rage. He developed the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs. He had a mad feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at a time.... His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast. Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him A against the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat" (Crane 493). So it is either this man is turning into a werewolf or he is just really angry. I presume this story is all about anger because this short excerpt fits into the realism genre of literature. This story is trying to depict this man's life at the moment. Crane wants to tell us of this man's emotions of the war time atmosphere and pressure.

I also would believe that from "The Red Badge of Courage" can fit into the naturalism subset of realism. "More specifically, naturalist authors were largely interested in maintaining Darwin's suppositions that human beings were soulless creatures, "merely higher-order animals," bereft of free will, whose mannerisms and behavior resulted primarily from their heredity and the influences of a capricious environment" (Sommers). "from The Red Badge of Courage" is about a man who seems as if he is a soulless creature. He has this emotion of anger and before he knows it, he is described as having the rage of a driven beast. This is not something that happens to many people. He let an emotion compromise him and he has no control over it. This shows his act of free will, his behavior is not controllable and he is merely just another animal in the world. It is the anger that drives this man that makes the story fit into the subset of naturalism. Even though the anger is uncontrollable, it is still an emotion of human nature. It is in the nature of all humans to be angry, and sometimes we can let this emotion take us over. This is what happens to the man in the story. It happens to everyone, you just do not always see it. I know one time I got really angry at a computer game, so I ejected the disc and then snapped it in half. It is just some people control their anger better than others.

There is also a small use of figurative language in this excerpt. In the opening part; "He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements" (Crane 493). This is just saying he was doing a familiar task and for some reason he was doing it extremely quickly.




Crane, Stephan. "from The Red Badge of Courage." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus; McGraw-Hill, 2010. 493. Print.


Sommers, Joseph Michael. "naturalism." In Maunder, Andrew. Facts On File Companion to the British Short Story. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Feb 13, 2011.


Werlock, Abby H. P. "realism." The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2009. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Feb 13, 2011.