The Red Badge of Courage :: essays research papers

The passing Badge of Courage, by its very title, is infested with people of colour imagery and color symbols. While stretch forth uses color to expound, he to a fault allows it to stand for all c formerlypts. Gray, for example, describes both the verbal image of a dead soldier and hydrogen Flemings vision of the sleeping soldiers as corpses and perplexs to stand for the idea of death. In the same way, red describes both the soldiers physical wounds and Henrys noetic vision of battle. In the process, it gains a symbolic meaning which Crane bequeath put an icon like the red badge of courage. Stephen Crane uses color in his descriptions 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 dawning As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors (1). The fog clears to reveal the literal green world of grass. It also reveals another green world, the world of the youth. Like school children, the young soldier tells rumors within the regiment. This inwrought puzzleting provides an ironic place for killing, just as these men seem to be the wrong ones fighting in the well-bred War. Stephen Crane says something on this in the narrative He was aware that these battalions with their commotions were twine red and startling into the gentle fabric of the softened greens and browns. It looked to be a wrong place for the battlefield (26).Green is an image of the natural world and of the armys youth, while red in the forward quote is clearly and image of battle. In the beginning, however, Crane uses red to describe distant campfires one could see across 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 eyes. He continues th is metaphor in the back up chapter From across the river, the deep red eyes were still peering (15). Crane because 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.