It reminded me a lot of the dialogue of Twain’s books. Second, I think Crane must have really captured how Americans used to speak in the mid to late nineteenth century. Even when Henry is in the thick of the fighting, I didn’t really get a sense of how dirty, terrifying, and loud that I know the battles must have been. It’s not overdone, but it’s very poised and elegant. First of all, Henry’s thoughts are described in elegant prose–that’s the best way that I can describe it. Believe it or not, what caught my attention was the language Crane used. Summaries of this book are easy to come by, so I want to focus on what struck me most about the book. After a brief introduction, we follow Henry to his first (unnamed) battles and the whole book takes place over just a few short days. The reader spends the whole book not precisely in young Henry’s head, but we get to hear, see, and feel everything he does as well as get every single though that crosses his mind. I’d understood him to be of the Realist school of writing, but this book seemed to be an early form of stream of consciousness. It wasn’t what I’d expected, based on what I’d heard of Crane’s work. Any yet the main character, Henry Fleming, seems to hit the absolute highest and lowest points possible for a soldier of his day. If you’re at all familiar with it, The Red Badge of Courage is a very short book–not even 150 pages. But with this year being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, it seemed like an appropriate time to finally read it. Somehow I managed to get all the way through high school and a bachelor’s degree in literature without having read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.
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