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The Red Badge of Courage 9070 Views


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Description:

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage about the Civil War not long after the war had ended. And get this: he didn't even fight in the war. What gives?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:05

Red Badge of Courage, a la Shmoop. Classic literature has the power to make you

00:13

feel like you are… there.

00:15

There could be anywhere from the 1920s South…[old truck drives past old barn]

00:18

…to a barn full of talking, communistic animals…[communist pigs fire missile]

00:24

…or even among the horrors of the American Civil War. [Civil War re-enactment]

00:29

The Civil War is exactly where Stephen Crane takes us in The Red Badge of Courage.

00:37

But would it ruin it if we told you that Stephen Crane never even went to war? [Stephen Crane watching re-enactments on couch]

00:40

Brace yourself, because that’s exactly what we’re going to do: Stephen Crane never even

00:43

went to war.

00:44

Does that fact change your view of the book and its celebrated realism?

00:56

Some people are miffed. They think authors who haven't experienced war shouldn't write [actor gets tomato thrown at them]

01:01

about it, especially from such a personal angle.

01:05

Everything in Red Badge of Courage is filtered through Henry Fleming’s eyes, but how can

01:10

someone who never lived through it know what those eyes saw? [Crane holds two eyeballs on strings]

01:16

From a perspective that close, it’s impossible to tell where Crane’s knowledge ends and

01:21

his embellishments begin. [zombie walks across screen]

01:27

But maybe those sticklers are just killjoys in general.

01:30

See, there’s another camp that doesn’t care Crane never fought a battle in his life.

01:39

Tolkien never went to Middle-Earth, as far as we know. [Tolkien throws ring into lava]

01:45

And Henry Fleming may be fictional, but the thoughts and feelings he’s having are super

01:50

authentic. What matters is that Crane changed the way

01:53

we think about war. [Civil War re-enactment]

01:55

He showed us the harsh reality of battle through the eyes of soldier, instead of a distant

01:59

birds-eye view that made the whole thing seem kind of poetic.

01:59

We don’t know about you, but we fail to see the beauty of living in a trench filled

02:03

with mud, blood, body parts, and disease.

02:07

Does the fact that Stephen Crane never went to war invalidate his work?

02:12

Or does it hardly matter? Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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