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[交流] 【Original】The Red Badge Of Courage

My book review -------The Red Badge Of Courage
This novel was written by Stephen Crane, who was a famous novelist and poet of America in the 19th. Stephen Crane the son of a Methodist minister was born in New Jersey in 1871, and graduated from the college of Hudson River in New York. He had written articals for the Herald(the Australian national evening newapaper of English version) and the Tribute(the Tribute is managed by the Tribune Company which is a large United States multimedia corporation based in Chicago). Before he reached twenty-five, Crane had made his mark on the American literary scene by writing two major works:Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage(1895). At the age of twenty-eight, in failing health, he traveled from England to Germany to recuperate in the healing atmosphere of the Black Forest. While working on a humorous novel, The O'Ruddy, he died in Germany of tuberculosis in June of 1900. He had thought life was full of hardness, as a result most of his works describing the lives of the poor or the substrata of the society. Just like a painter, he wanted to reveal not the details but the whole of something or somebody. His work style was sufficiently expressed by the vivid scenes and fertile imagination.
This fiction was published by D. Appleton & Company in 1895 just when Stephen Crane was 23 year old. Acclaimed by many readers, he sprang into fame. The story has the America Cival War which was the soleonly cival war in America history for the slavery between the year 1861 and 1865 as a backgroud. There are totally 24 chapters. The protagonist was called Henry Fleming, the only child of a countrywoman, who was eager to demonstrate his patriotism in a glorious battle. Therefore he jioned the Northern Army determinedly regardless of his mother's block.
At first, his army-life was calm. After several months the regiment was given order to march, and the soldiers spent several weary days traveling on foot. Eventually they approached a battlefield and began to hear the distant roar of conflict. Never before did Henry face a battle, he felt nervous and stimulated, and at the same time the threat of death made him shaken. He felt ambivalenced. However when the regiment encountered sudden strike, influenced by some other soliders’ panic, he also escaped from the far field. Finally the Northern Army achieved victory, and Henry regreted for his behavior. So he determined to spare no effort to catch up with the militery in the front line. At halfway he get injured by an insaned soldier in the head, but with the help of a transient soldier he found his previous battalion in the end. No one considered he was a lamaster, they admired his bravery, and the wound in his head was thought to be “the red badge”. Afflicted with conscience, Henry determined to make up for his shameful behavior.
The regiment launched an attack again, but failed. As all the comrades stopt shooting, Henry still sticked to fighting crazily. He was regarded as a hero. In a sense, this made him get rid of the fear of war, forget the shame of his first escape and most importantly win selfhood. Afterward he established brilliant achievements in the war again, and his undaunted courage obtained the superior officer’s high appreciation. He witnessed a friend's gruesome death and became enraged at the injustice of war. The courage of common soldiers and the agonies of death cured him of his romantic notions. He returned to his regiment and continued to fight on with true courage and without illusions.
This story is simple, but through detailed description of the protagonist’s inner world and vivid portrayal of battle scenes, the autor not only invents the chaos and monotony of war but exhibits the special beauty of war—The flag was fluttering in the breeze under a blue sky, the soldiers rushed into the battlefield with sparkling rhth as morning had broken. This text describes the warfare from the point of a common sodier’s view and highlights the personal specific feelings in the battle with intense sentimentalism. It tells us how the protagonist changes from a craven to a hero. The exquisite psychological description of the character makes me attractived just like the personal experience. And there are plenty of grace sentences expressed with rhetorical methodes of metaphor and personification, when reading it I can feel the beauty of what the author describes.
In fact Crane had had no experience of war when he wrote this novel, which he based partly on a popular anthology, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. The Red Badge of Courage has been called the first modern war novel because, uniquely for its time, it tells of the experience of war from the point of an ordinary soldier’s view. Just as what laurence Holland has said, Crane is particularly morden in observing complex and ambiguous human characteristics and making the readers themselves to judge from Herry’s reactions to the experience of his own right or not. A new edition of a classic that really does make a major change in the interpretation of the novel. And Crane is regarded as one of the fearless innovative writers promoting to form contemporary style of American novel. Crane's genius is as much apparent in his sharp, colorful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the terror of battle becomes our own in a masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American fiction began with Stephen Crane.
Though this book was written in 1895, its sentences are fluent and easy to understand for us now. The Red Badge of Courage is one of the most powerful statements against war that can be found in all of literatures. It is the masterpiece of literary works, and it is one of the few novels written before the century that meets our modern sense of the realities of mass warfare. In my opinion it is worth reading.

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