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The Red Badge of Courage 9071 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?
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]
Full Transcript
- 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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