Red Badge Of Courage Essay

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The Red Badge of Courage is not only a film about war and soldiers, but also the way life was actually lived back in the 1800s. Stephen Crane uses this war to try and compare it to everyday life. He is trying to say that life is like war. Life is like a fight against your problems, your enemies, and also the struggle to keep your principles and traditions alive. What I’m trying to say is, in the movie the south is trying to keep the only thing they have ever known the same as always. In these battles of everyday life, people can change; they don’t always stay the same. In this movie, the main character, Henry Fleming has a change of person. In the beginning, the first battle they have he ends up running away and catching up to his fellow…show more content…
When Jim goes along with it he thinks that it isn’t such a bad thing to run as long as someone else is doing the same thing. He told himself that if someone were to throw a thing, such as rock, at an animal to scare it and it runs away. Then why couldn’t he run when his life was put on the line. And this is where Henry’s character change takes place. In the real world, humans are faced with challenges they are not always up to fight for. In a sense, Henry was busy thinking about running and his fear of death that he couldn’t actually be the good soldier he was taught to be. As in good soldier, being the person who goes about killing, fighting, and defending not worrying about if dying is the ending. These are not always the best of things, but this is what soldiers are taught to do. This is their job! Henry, you could say, was scared. He didn’t want to risk his life out on the field fighting. To make him become the best soldier he had to become unthinking. When Henry got past his invisible blockade, his fear, he becomes a killing machine. If you think about it, people can’t think too much about what they are about to do, or they become terrified and will fail. Once Henry was over his fear of death, he was

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