The Red Badge Of Courage

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Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE In certain ways, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is concerned more with a later American generation forgetting the Civil War than with a realistic depiction of how that war was actually fought from the viewpoint of the common soldier. Such forgetting paradoxically occurs through the way Americans remembered—and continue to remember—the Civil War: the emphasis of major campaigns won or lost or, to use the title of a text regarded as one of Crane's major sources, on "battles and leaders of the Civil War." The Red Badge, of course, obfuscates both battles (is the scene Chancellorsville?) and leaders (Fleming's army "superiors" go unnamed except for "MacChesnay," an unknown regiment colonel). The major cause of the war also is virtually forgotten, perhaps, because of middle-class, post-Reconstructionist sentiments; the only sign of it appears with the "negro" teamster who "sits 'mournfully down' to lament his loss of an audience" (Kaplan 277). In Crane's novel, even the warring parties have lost their political specificity, being reduced in cultural memory to visual metaphors, the "blue" and "gray" armies, as if mere figures in a game. One can regard such forgetfulness as a duplication of Crane's general vision of epistemological solipsism. In the novel Fleming never knows what his fellow soldiers are thinking ("His failure to discover any mite of resemblance in their view points made him more miserable than before" [2:428]) or, from one moment to the next, how to regard his desertion. Critics continually debate the issue of his growth, arguing either that he achieves it or, relying on manuscript evidence, that Crane frames his protagonist's own sense of growth ("He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood" [24:538]) in an ironic light. How, then, can a later generation fully appreciate the social
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