The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [106]
In more recent times, Tim O‘Brien’s memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) takes war writing to an even more realistic level. (The title is the first two lines of a song soldiers sing during Army training; the second couplet is “Pin my medals to my chest/Tell my mom I did my best.”) Whereas Hemingway based the plots, characters, and descriptions in his fiction on his experiences in wartime, O’Brien directly chronicles, with stark realism, the personal trauma he suffered fighting the “wrong war” : the American intervention in the civil war in Vietnam. Like Stephen Crane, O‘Brien is concerned with the meaning of human courage and valor. Unlike the youth Henry Fleming, O’Brien is unable to flee; he is drawn, incomprehensibly, toward the horror, toward a war he had always opposed. If I Die in a Combat Zone painfully details events and images from the war in Vietnam—the mismanagement of American forces, the accidental shellings of villages, the red flesh and white bone of maimed soldiers and children, the invisibility of the enemy, unseen mines that render bodies unrecognizable, and the impossibility of communication. Tim O‘Brien has also written of Vietnam with raw clarity in several short stories and novels, among them the fictional Going After Cacciato (1978), which won the National Book Award in 1979.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
GEORGE WYNDHAM
Mr. Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage (London: Heinemann) , is a great artist, with something new to say, and consequently, with a new way of saying it. His theme, indeed, is an old one, but old themes re-handled anew in the light of novel experience are the stuff out of which masterpieces are made, and in The Red Badge of Courage Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece. He writes of war—the ominous and alluring possibility for every man, since the heir of all the ages has won and must keep his inheritance by secular combat. The conditions of the age-long contention have changed and will change, but its certainty is coeval with progress: so long as there are things worth fighting for fighting will last, and the fashion of fighting will change under the reciprocal stresses of rival inventions. Hence its double interest of abiding necessity and ceaseless variation. Of all these variations the most marked has followed, within the memory of most of us, upon the adoption of long-range weapons of precision, and continues to develop, under our eyes, with the development of rapidity in firing. And yet, with the exception of Zola’s la Débâcle, no considerable attempt has been made to portray war under its new conditions.
Mr. Crane, for his distinction, has hit on a new device, or at least on one which has never been used before with such consistency and effect. In order to show the features of modern war, he takes a subject—a youth with a peculiar temperament, capable of exaltation and yet morbidly sensitive. Then he traces the successive impressions made on such a temperament, from