Aimless Fighting For Survival

Stephen Crane (1871—1900), a great American novelist, short-story writer and poet, is one of the forerunners and exponents of American literary naturalism. His masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, is one of the most widely known and deeply influential novels in the history of American fiction. At its publication in book form in 1895, the novel immediately shocked the literary world in both America and Britain. Many reviewers devoted much of their attention to the seeming impossibility that Crane could write so realistically about war without ever having experienced combat. The early critics praised it for its rich imagination, realistic view of war, original language, new devices and vivid imageries. Crane's work was, for the most part, neglected for nearly twenty years after his death. However, the outbreak of World War I renewed interest in Crane. Since 1950s critics did more research into the work from different aspects. Different views on the style of The Red Badge of Courage are formed: most of the critics hold that the novel is a piece of naturalistic work; some take it as impressionistic, and others regard it as realistic. Criticism from 1960s to 1980s has examined Crane's novel from psychological, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, and moral perspectives. The tendency in criticism of The Red Badge of Courage in 1980s was the application of various post-structuralist theoretical approaches to an interpretation of the novel. In 1990s the critics began to study whether Crane was forced to cut some part of The Red Badge of Courage. Today, Crane's critical reputation remains strong.This thesis intends to read the novel from a naturalistic perspective. The author of this thesis argues that Crane, inspired by naturalism, becomes very concerned with man's internal world and destiny and tries to get closer to human nature. From the naturalistic themes and style in The Red Badge of Courage, the reader can find that the society and universe where human beings live is just like the battlefield and jungle, and humans go to great lengths to fight for survival, but eventually they cannot really survive because they are controlled by interaction and contradiction between outer and inner forces.This dissertation consists of six chapters. The first chapter is mainly an introduction of the literary reviews on Crane and his masterpiece. Little research has been done on the systematic analysis of naturalistic elements in the novel. The thesis aims to analyze the...