¶ … Red Badge of Courage Realism and naturalism are two separate but related literary terms. The former is a term which refers to any art form which endeavors to recreate a true-to-life sensibility even in a fictional work. Naturalism on the other hand refers to the natural laws which give order to human beings and also to the natural world. Works of art which utilize realism and naturalism try to duplicate the emotions and observations that one would experience if the work were a piece of non-fiction. Author Stephen Crane was born in the years following the American Civil War. During his youth, he witnessed the reconstruction of the union and heard the stories of brave men on both sides who fought and willingly died for the principles in which they believed. His most famous author, The Red Badge of Courage, tells the story of a young man fighting in the Civil War who abandons his post and his comrades in arms. This young man is disgusted by his own cowardice. He wishes that he would get wounded and then receive the title "badge of courage" (Crane 55). Such a wound would somehow validate himself both in his own eyes and to the greater population. What sets this story apart from other war narratives, from the Civil War or others, is the realistic tone in which the narrator tells his story. Throughout the piece, the reader is always within the mind of the narrator...
Indeed, cases could be made for either argument. Crane never made a public determination of which side the story took. Rather, the story tells about a single young man fighting in a war and how he felt afraid of death far more than he felt patriotism or partisanship. It is important to note that Stephen Crane very rarely provides much details about time or location in which the events of the story are taking place. This effectively gives The Red Badge of Courage a more realistic feel and opens up the potential interpretations of the story. This young man could be fighting the Civil War or any other war in history where young men are asked to put their lives on the line at the behest of their leaders.
.. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. (Conrad 81) Crane thus suggests how the heat of battle becomes focused on a symbol, in this case the flag, and soldiers emerge from battle with this new symbol clearly in mind. The imagery used makes an association between the flag and a goddess, thus indicating a sexual appeal at the same time. Henry changes in
Mark Twain's realism in fully discovered in the novel The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, book which is known to most of readers since high school, but which has a deeper moral and educational meaning than a simple teenage adventure story. The simplicity of plot and the events that are described in the book look to be routine for provincial life of Southerners in the middle of the 19th century. But
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the best example of Realism in literature because of how Twain presents it to us. Morality becomes something that Huck must be consider and think out as opposed to something forced down his throat. He knows the moral thing to do would be to report Jim, noting, " "People would call me a low down abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum --
Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until
"The Open Boat" may have been based on Crane's real-life experience but it also functions as symbolic "of man's battle against the malevolent, indifferent, and unpredictable forces of nature…This reading is confirmed by the final irony of the death of the oiler, physically the strongest man on the scene and the one most favored to withstand the ordeal" (Rath & Shaw 97). The futility of resisting the power nature with
One critic's reading of "The Open Boat" positions the story as a turning point in Crane's career, away from the isolation and interiority of The Red badge of Courage and towards a sense of the need of community and the inescapability of interpersonal bonding. Statements like "Four scowling men sat in the dingey" are taken by some to be indicators of the camaraderie that must necessarily form between any
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