preview

Essay on From Fear to Courage

Good Essays

From Fear to Courage When new soldiers go to fight in a war, they never know what’s coming. Although events are preserved in stories by the veterans, nothing can capture the real thing. Seeing everything up close and personal can change a person dramatically. Soldiers may never be the same after traumatic events such as these. Wars test a person and shows how strong not just physically, but mentally, one is. Stephen Crane, throughout his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, creates three distinct tones by utilizing the stylistic devices of imagery and figurative language, which reinforce Crane’s fearful, unworthy and courageous attitude on the realities of war. In the novel, fear is one of the very first tones viewed as one begins the …show more content…

As Crane describes the Confederates as ‘dragons’ and ‘monsters’, it gives one a fearful image and can make him feel anxious or afraid. Dragons and monsters are always seen in a daunting view. In chapter seven, Crane uses this fear and attempts to channel this tone through the reader. Crane successfully has the reader engaged in the writing while be able to feel what Henry must be feeling. However, in chapter ten, Crane helps readers visualize a different tone. As for chapter ten, that stuck out to some was unworthiness. To feel unworthy is not a pleasant feeling. It is like one is without value or just undeserving, and no one wants to feel like that. When people head to war, during this time period, they would head to war without any training. All the government wanted was numbers, and fast. So they would get deployed, and that’s that. But when it is just an eighteen or nineteen year old kid, he may feel provincial when he is surrounded by veterans who know and have seen death, while the kid is still scared out of his mind by it. Through imagery, Crane is able to express this tone clearly. “He now thought that he wished he was dead. He believed that he envied those men whose bodies lay strewn over the grass of the fields and on the fallen leaves of the forest” (Crane 46). Henry wants to just drop dead more than anything here. He does not feel he really deserves to be alive because he has not done anything for

Get Access