The Red Badge of Courage is one of the better forms of fiction that i'd had the pleasure to read over the past few years - in a manner it can be described as part of the move towards realism among the wider American and British context in the late nineteenth and early twenteith centuries - or so the essay on Crane's work would lead me to believe. The theoretics aside, Red Badge is a very engaging and lovely story of war.

The main character, Henry, is a young New Yorker participating for the first time in battle at Chancellorsville. Like all young soldiers he has visions of war, tinged with the kind of romanticism that is common before one undergoes the rigour of battle for the first time and like all he wonders if he will break and run when things get tough. The majority of the story revolves around these themes - the painful thought by Henry that he might, and indeed does run away from battle, and the ideal of getting a "red badge of courage" or wound which he also does but not from Confederate guns and afterwards sees Henry transform into a brave, valient soldier.

It's a remarkably well done story - made all the more impressive by its small length, only about a hundred pages. The included short stories in this Barnes & Noble collection are fairly good, particularly The Veteran, which I thought gave a very nice conclusion to the Henry character seen as an old man years after the end of the Civil War. ( )

Wow. I could really feel the emotional struggles that Henry went through. The almost non existent usage of proper names pulled me into the story. It made me feel like I was part of it and these were people I knew.