The Impressionistic Teachniques In The Red Badge Of Courage

When The Red Badge of Courage appeared in 1895, some of the British reviewers, assuming that they were reading a Realistic novel, announced that Stephen Crane was a Veteran of the American Civil War and that only a person who had actually experienced these events could possibly have presented them so vividly. (1)In a letter to John Northern Hilliard, Crane said " I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle... but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively..."(2) Crane never went to the war before writing the novel The Red Badge of Courage. However, the book became famous overnight in England as well as the United States. The success of the story is due to not merely to what Crane knows of battlefield, but to what he knows of the human heart. His gifts were not simply the photographic skills of journalism but the qualities of imagination of a creative fictionist. Crane's war novel had applied Impressionistic ideas to fiction with a precision never before seen in American literature. Impressionism was his faith. "Impressionism," he said, "was truth, and no man could be great who was not an impressionist, for greatness consisted in knowing truth. He said that he did not expect himself to be great, but he hoped to get near the truth."(3) Indeed, he did it well in The Red Badge of Courage.The Red Badge of Courage is the story of the mind of a new young Northern soldier as he accustoms himself to war during two days in and out of his first battle. There is a preliminary debate with himself as to whether he will run away or not. When his regiment is charged a second time, he does; but in the battle of this second day he is awar devil. After the hard new fighting he and the loud youth are commended. The last sentence of the novel speaks of Henry's conquest of his own fear, his initiation into true manhood. "He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man...Scars fades as flowers." (4) Henry Fleming evades from crude ambition to manly self-possession. He stands up well enough in his first skirmish; he panics in his second and runs with other fleeing soldiers; having had the luck to return to his unit, he joins battle in his third skirmish like a madman; in his fourth skirmish, even though he knows how bad the odds arc for his unit, he fights courageously, carried away perhaps in his eagerness to take over as color-bearer, but by no means overcome with a mad excess of zeal. Although The Red Badge of Courage is not the first non-romantic story about the civil war, it is the first to capture a vast popular audience. The simply yet humanly rich account of the inexperienced young man endures a painful, sudden growth under the cruel demands of war. His progression, from eager anticipation of glory in battle, to fear in the face of grim reality, to obtain courage that finally conquers the fear, is very real and very compelling.Critics have not failed to ask how The Red Badge of Courage was. produced. Garland, who read the manuscript with amazement, was the first: How did Crane know about war? And " in his succinct self-derisive way, he candidly confessed that all his knowledge of battle had been gained on the football field! The psychology is the same. The opposite team is an enemy tribe!"Crane had his introduction to literary theory in the summer of 1891 when covering the New Jersey resorts for his brother's press agency, he attended a lecture by Hamlin Garland, who had a strong interest in the newly popular impressionists in painting. Since the revival of interest in his writings in the early 1950s, he has been variously categorized as a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist, a symbolist, a visionist, and even a romantic. This is with some justification, for he employed all of these perspectives in different works and at times in the same work. Some full-lengthstudies of Stephen Crane have appeared. The chronological sequence of criticism begins with...