Journal #23 The Red Badge of Courage and How it Shows Realism

“The Red Badge of Courage” is a classic war story that was written by the author Stephen Crane. It is a Civil War war story and even though the author was born after the War ended, he did a great job of including details and descriptions of the people and places of the Civil War. He was fascinated by the war and he does a great job to make it seem like he was in the war even though he was born after it ended. During this time period, Realism was becoming very popular and elements from that literary time period show up in this work. Crane does a great job of using imagery in his work, such as describing settings and people not with only one sense such as how they look but he does a great job of making it feel like you are really there because, of how describes things using all of the senses. This imagery is very important to the Realism time period and so is some other figurative language such as alliteration. Right after you start reading this story you can already see some alliteration by how he describes things to give them human like characteristics. Also one of the biggest things of the Realism time period was how they portrayed a hero. The main character, Henry, is not the modern hero that we think of because, he is just a normal kid who is going off to war but in the Realism time period he is because, they classify their hero as someone ordinary who is put in extraordinary situations. Henry is definitely this because, he is just an ordinary kid but he is put in the extraordinary situation of being in one of the bloodiest wars every. I really liked how Crane used this ordinary kid to tell of a war story. Overall, this book shows many important elements from the Realism time period and is very important to American Literature overall.