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Example research essay topic: Red Badge Of Courage Color Red - 1,488 words

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The Red Badge of Courage, by its very title, is invested in color imagery and color symbols. While Crane uses color to describe, he also allows it to stand for whole concepts. Gray, for example, describes the both the literal image of a dead soldier and Henry Flemings vision of the sleeping soldiers as corpses and comes to stand for the idea of death. In the same way, red describes both the soldiers physical wounds and Flemings mental visions of battle. In the process, it gains a symbolic meaning which Crane will put to an icon like the red badge of courage (110). Crane uses color in his descriptions of the physical and the metaphysical and allows color to take on meanings ranging from the literal to the figurative.

Crane opens the novel with a description of the fields at dawn: As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors (43). The fog clears to reveal a literal green world of grass. It also reveals another green world, the green world of youth. Like schoolchildren, the young soldiers circulate rumor within the regiment. This natural setting proves an ironic place for killing, just as these fresh men seem the wrong ones to be fighting in the Civil War. Crane remarks on this later in the narrative: He was aware that these battalions with their commotions were woven red and startling into the gentle fabric of the softened greens and browns.

It looked to be a wrong place for a battlefield (69). Green is an image of the natural world and of the regiments fresh youth, while red, in the previous quote, is clearly an image of battle. At the start, however, Crane uses red to describe distant campfires: ... one could see across the red, eyelids gleam of the hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of the distant hills (43). Obviously, the fires are red.

But Fleming characterizes the blazes as the enemy's glowing eyes. He continues this metaphor in the next chapter: From across the river the deep red eyes were still peering (58). Crane then transforms this metaphor into a conceit 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 (59). The red of the campfires comes to represent eyes of the enemy, of dragons. The monstrous dragons are, indeed, the opposing army: The dragons were coming with invincible strides.

The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the blood swollen god, would have his fill (130). The color red also describes more literal objects in the text. Flags, as emblems of each army, are frequently described in red. In the texts final battle, the youth could not tell from the battle flags flying like crimson foam in many directions which color of cloth was winning (89). At a different point in the narrative, Fleming notices flags here and there...

the red in the stripes dominating (89). Gunfire, as one should suspect, is usually described in red terms. Knife like fire from rifles is later referred to as beams of crimson (164). Anger, although more metaphysical than gunfire, also seems naturally connected with the color red.

At the end of the text, Fleming is ashamed of his initial shortcomings as a soldier and emits an outburst of crimson oaths (209). Perhaps these are angry, impassioned words or perhaps they are promises regarding his courage in battle. Either way, Cranes use of red or crimson literally colors their intention for the reader. Earlier in the text, Fleming is in a red rage...

He wished to rush forward and strangle with his fingers. He craved a power that would enable him to make a world-sweeping gesture and brush all back. His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast (85). This red rage demonstrates the violent passion of this soldiers desire to fight. Thus far we have three elements of battle: flags, gunfire and anger. These things comprise the red monster of war.

I have, however, left out the most graphic and obvious thing that connects red to battle: the red of the blood every soldier stands to shed. Physical injury is introduced most clearly in the books title. Fleming wishes for a wound, a red badge of courage (110). To face wounds in battle is every soldiers sentence. Fleming, however, thinks that a wound will somehow bring him into true soldier hood, will combat his youthful anxiety.

He idealizes the brave veterans who he imagines have red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms. These images of red wounds are saved for the quick; dead men are never described in red, but rather in gray. The red badge of courage is for those who survive. Ironically, even after Flemings initial injury, he does not receive the metaphorical badge he wants; his wound is never described in terms of red. In fact, Fleming finds his courage in the end with out bodily injury.

He avoids death in battle and dispels his fear of flight from his regiment: He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion and he was escaped (209). By the end, He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle (212). The red sickness is not an angry emotion, but rather a fear. Red works, here, towards a new meaning.

He finds courage by overcoming his fear of the red animal, war and therefore being able to face death. It has been the red sickness that had previously kept Fleming from his red badge of courage. Although the acceptance of death comes with the red badge of courage, the text acknowledges that death itself is in no way courageous. While the blood of injury and battle are red, all imagery of death is a lifeless gray.

He follows this connection between gray and death as rigorously as he follows the former red connection. Gray is not only the uniform color for the opposition, but also the color of many omens of death, and of each dead or deathly person Fleming encounters. Gray, first of all, is the uniform color of the opposing army: Fleming perceived with dim amazement that their uniforms were rather gay in effect, being light gray... (186). This realization is a little ironic since gray so quickly loses its gaiety within this narrative. Perhaps it reflects Flemings growing awareness of the battlefield and his loss of fear about death.

Crane introduces gray in another way when he writes: ... he could see long, gray walls of vapor where lay battle lines (105). These are the battle lines which will, later that day, go on to kill Jim Conklin, the tall soldier. This tragedy of the day is also foreshadowed by a gray dawn (67). On another day of intense battle there is a similar dawn: Gray mists were slowly shifting before the first efforts of the sun rays... The gaunt, careworn features and dusty figures were made plain by this quaint light at the dawning, but it dressed the skin of the men in corpse like hues and made the tangled limbs appear pulse less and dead (145).

In this description Crane alludes to grays significance in rendering a bodys death. He continues this gray imagery in a more specific way. The first corpse that Fleming finds, in the forest, has gray skin with little ants running over it (101). When Jim begins to show the wear of his injury, His face turned to a semblance of gray paste (112).

He collapses and dies moments later. Shortly after that episode, Fleming watches another die: His face was of a clammy pallor (132). Finally, Crane announces the connection between gray imagery and death: Another had the gray seal of death already upon his face (106). Obviously, when people die their faces appear gray. But Crane charges his use of gray so that it signals death and even comes to represent death within the text.

Cranes use of color allows for layers of meaning within each hue. Green, red and gray are used to describe the everyday physical objects in the texts world, and also the landscapes and metaphysical objects and ideas in Flemings mind. Green is literally the color of the grass, but figuratively the freshness and youth of the soldiers and the purity of the natural world. Red is, overwhelmingly the color of battle, of courage and gunfire and bloodshed. Gray, however, becomes the color of human defeat. Because Crane uses each so carefully and selectively, creating for each several meanings, they take on a significance of their own; each can stand alone to have its own charged meanings.


Free research essays on topics related to: red badge of courage, gray, natural world, color red, fleming

Research essay sample on Red Badge Of Courage Color Red

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