Journal #25 Critical Review of The Red Badge of Courage

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We finally finished up reading The Red Badge of Courage, a civil war novel written by Stephen Crane, and honestly I really liked reading the novel because, it had a good story, characters and figurative language but, it was just a really slow read. It had great imagery and the author did a great job of describing the civil war. In the review I read it talked a lot about how powerful and emotional The Red Badge of Courage was and I completely agree with that. With all the death, fear of battle, and the general melancholy mood around him, it is very easy to see why Henry, the main character in the story, would be so emotional throughout the story. He had many emotions about him running away from the battle and, in the beginning of the story he had a fear of the battle but as the story went on he started to get rid of the fear and go into battle. Also one the things that was much praised from The Red Badge of Courage was how Crane used Henry to show how the war was instead of showing a much more large scale point of view, like if the novel would have portrayed a whole regiment as the main characters instead of just one man. This was a very effective method utilized by Crane because, this was really the first time that someone had described a war from just one man’s point of view and also because it shows some of the struggles that an everyday soldier had to go through. One thing in this critical review that I definitely did not agree with was that Crane showed a lack of patriotism in this novel. Just because Crane did not just focus on all the good things that happened during war, does not mean he is not patriotic. Crane just showed some struggles that an everyday man, turned a soldier, has to go through when he decides to enter the war. Nobody had really every written a story like this before about a war so I think that is one reason why his story got so much praise as well as being criticized widely.