The Red Badge of Courage :: essays research papers

The Red Badge of Courage, by its genuinely title, is infested with coloring imagery and color symbols. While Crane uses color to describe, he also allows it to stand for whole concepts. Gray, for example, describes both the existent image of a dead soldier and Henry Flemings vision of the sleeping soldiers as corpses and comes to stand for the idea of death. In the same way, trigger-happy describes both the soldiers corporeal wounds and Henrys mental vision of battle. In the process, it gains a typic meaning which Crane will put an icon like the red badge of courage. Stephen Crane uses color in his translations of the physical and the non-physical and allows color to take on meanings ranging from the literal to the figurative.Stephen Crane begins the novel with a description of the fields in the morning As the landscape changed from b rowingn to green, the array awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors (1). The fog clears to reveal the literal gre en world of grass. It also reveals another green world, the world of the youth. same school children, the young soldier tells rumors within the regiment. This natural setting provides an ironical place for killing, just as these men seem to be the misemploy ones fighting in the Civil War. Stephen Crane says something on this in the level He was awargon that these battalions with their commotions were woven red and startling into the gentle material of the softened greens and browns. It looked to be a wrong place for the theatre (26).Green is an image of the natural world and of the armys youth, magic spell red in the previous quote is clearly and image of battle. In the beginning, however, Crane uses red to describe distant campfires one could see crosswise the red, eye-like gleam of the hostile campfires set in the low brows of the distant hills (1). Obviously, the fires are red, but Henry characterizes the blazes as the enemys glowing eyeball. He continues this metaphor in the second chapter From across the river, the deep red eyes were still peering (15). Crane then transforms this metaphor into arrogance used throughout the text Staring once at the red eyes across the river, he conceived then to be growing larger, as the orbs of a row of dragons advancing (16). The red campfires come to represent eyes of the enemy, of dragons.