Comparing A Soldier's Heart And Red Badge Of Courage

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

      In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane explores the theme of courage and heroism in depth. He develops these themes through the main character, Henry Fleming. Henry is a naïve young man faced with the harsh realities of war, in this book, some argue that Henry is transformed into a heroic "quiet manhood" while others see Henry as the same young man who ran from battle in the beginning of the book. I think Henry doesn't change, his heroic status acquired at the end of the book isn't truly him, instead he merely is motivated by fear of dying and being rejected by his fellow soldiers.

The comparisons in the plot service in molding the books and helping the reader to have a better understanding of a soldier’s thoughts, and their mental state of mind. Close friendships form between the boys and other soldiers in their lines, in both cases the friend dies, forcing reality to set in and the boys are stricken with fear, and an urge for blood. At the beginning of the book, like Charley in “Soldier’s Heart,” Henry has certain morals he wants to keep, but loose in the heat of battle, becoming a savage in order to protect himself and his country. Surviving to see the end of the war, both boys have a wound left over from the war, whether it be a mental or physical scar, it is still present. These stories are alike in a numerous amount of ways that gives the reader a better sense of knowledge of what the soldiers go through during battle.

War can force young soldiers to grow up quickly. In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming is no exception. He enters the war with romanticized ideas of what war is like, and leaves with those ideas very much changed.

Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.

War changes people in many ways, especially the lives of the soldiers in the army. The changes that the soldiers go through are told in many novels, such as The Red Badge of Courage. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane is a coming-of-age novel because Henry Fleming changes from an immature adolescent to a mature man by the end of the novel.

Young men who are sent to a war learn the reality in a very harsh and brutal way. Both the stories, ‘The Red Convertible’ and ‘The Things They Carried’ portray the life of a young soldier and how he psychologically gets affected from all the things he had seen in the war. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ is more specific on the experiences of a soldier during a war where as Karen Louise Erdrich focuses more on describing the post war traumatic stress in her short story ‘The Red Convertible’. One thing similar in both the narrations is the Vietnam War and its consequences on the soldiers. From the background of both the authors it’s easy to conclude that Tim O’Brien being a war veteran emphasizes more on the

As men arrive at the training camps, the boys are more excited than ever and even make joked about killing the enemy. Their commander, Kemmerich, who used to be the local mailman, works hard to get the boys in shape and tries to tire them out. The boys slowly realize how war changes people even Kemmerich who had been a fun loving man who loved joking with the boys. They got a small tast of the realities of war but yet that still doesn’t shake the pride and excitement from their eyes for they are just getting started on their big adventure.

Red Badge of Courage and Soldier’s Heart have countless differences. Charley, from Soldiers Heart, is very brave. He is staying and fighting to win over the country of the United States of America. Henry, from the book, Red Badge of Courage, is a coward. He is running from the battle that he wanted to be in. In the novella Soldiers Heart, Charley is shot in battle,

The connections in Red Badge of Courage and Soldier’s Heart are very obvious even with the books being 100 years apart. Throughout the stories there are very little details that are diverse. However, there are many details that are comparable or identical. The book could be plagiarized from being so alike.

These two books have a great deal of similarities and several differences. However, the divergences with these books lets the reader know that they are in fact different books. With numerous similarities one could be led to contemplate that Soldier’s Heart was copied from Red Badge of Courage. Consequently, when one reads these two books, one would see that the two novellas have a whole heap of similarities and only a few differences.

These works share their messages through their main characters, Boy and Joe, respectively. The characters are similar in the way that they did not sign up for their wars, but are different in the sense that they experience different kinds of loss, and they had different amounts of knowledge of their conflicts. However, these differences do not take away from the shared theme. In fact, it makes it stronger. The differences show the terrible effects of war on everybody, whether they are in the war, outside of it, a solider or a civilian, young or old. Both Joe and Boy were intended to be universal characters, and to an extent they are, but together they truly show the disastrous impacts of war like no single character or story ever

These are three ways to tell the reader how unalike the young males were. The boys grew up in very altered places, which will distress the way they perform in combat. Henry grew up in the big metropolitan of New York while Charley was raised in a small town Minnesota. When the two teenagers decided to go into war, Henry's mother was in contradiction of it but he did it anyway. However, Charley's mother was gratified of him and wished for the best. When going into war, Charley was enthusiastic and bursting of luscious considerations of how all the ladies would finally notice him. On the other hand, Henry was petrified and had horrendous thoughts and outlooks of going into battle. All that Henry wanted was to come home and see his family again, and

War forces young soldiers to grow up quickly. In Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming is no exception. He is faced with the hard reality of war and this forces him to readjust his romantic beliefs about war. Through the novel, the reader can trace the growth and development of Henry through these four stages: (1) romanticizing war and the heroic role each soldier plays, (2) facing the realities of war, (3) lying to himself to maintain his self-importance, and (4) realistic awareness of his abilities and place in life. Through Henry’s experiences in his path to self-discovery, he is strongly affected by events that help shape his ideology of war, death,

The Red Badge of Courage is a story of self-discovery. The novel is set during the American Civil War, on multiple battlefields. Henry Fleming is a young soldier fighting for the Union. He first joined the army because he dreams of the glories of battle and performing heroic deeds in battle. Although Henry wishes to be a brave soldier, when in battle, his survival instincts take over, and he begins debating fight or flight. His desire to become a soldier and his instinct to survive introduces the main plot and conflict of the story: During a battle, he runs away. This causes him to see the contradiction in himself and it becomes an emotional conflict for him to solve out the contradiction. Because he is so hung up on the image of the war hero, even though he wasn’t shot at, but hit by a fellow soldier, he lies to his comrades that the wound was a bullet wound. He’s lied once to them about fighting bravely in battle when in actuality he ran away, and he lied again telling them that the head would which he actually got from another soldier was a bullet wound. The climax of the plot occurs when Henry redeems himself at another major battle by fighting bravely and taking up the Union flag when the flag bearer is wounded. He ignores his fears and faces the battle like the hero he’s dreamed of and he overcomes his survival instinct. The resolution happens after the battle is over and Henry survives. He reflects on the decisions he’s made and sees how much he’d