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When we play chess, what is always the first piece we sacrifice to achieve victory? The pawn, of course. The front line soldier that is always expendable. I am not that great a chess player but in my somewhat lacking strategies, I have even often used my pawn as bait to try and draw out my opponent's "more valuable" pieces into a trap. Nevermind what happens to that poor pawn.
In this Civil War novel, Stephen Crane invites us into the mind of just such a pawn. We see that he is not a mindless toy soldier, but an enlightened young man full of optimism and bravado, with family and friends back home and dreams of glory. We also see that as he is exposed to the dreadful realities of combat, he is all too human. He experiences fear as he turns and runs for his life, and senses a crushing shame at realizing his buddies stayed behind to fight. The burden of his shame is so oppressive that he can't deal with it in mundane terms and mentally creates an alternate reality in which HE is the hero because he retreated while his friends are the failures for foolishly staying behind to die in vain. But by a twist of fate, his misfortunes are reversed and he discovers courage within himself that he feared didn't exist.
Crane shows us this by taking us into battle so that we witness how this mortal young man deals with the stress of combat and finds inner strength by focusing on his task and nothing else, not even the possibility of his own death. We even see the "pawn's" hatred for the "king", as he inwardly fumes at the arrogant general who insultingly refers to him and his companions as "mule drivers." Next time you watch a Civil War film and you see soldiers topple over by the hundreds with each volley fired by the other side, remember this example of the nameless infantryman who, despite not being a celebrated general in all the newspaper stories, is indeed a human being with dreams and desires and intelligent thoughts who has to be the actual one to lay all that on the line by fighting the battle. Kudos to Mr. Crane, who wrote this book despite being born after the Civil War, for having a keen ear to the stories of the common foot soldiers who, as veterans, gave him a vivid glimpse of what it is like to be sent into battle by men on horses who didn't really care whether they lived or died Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Civil War Young Man
