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Red Badge of Courage, a la Shmoop. Classic literature has the power to make you

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feel like you are… there.

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There could be anywhere from the 1920s South…[old truck drives past old barn]

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…to a barn full of talking, communistic animals…[communist pigs fire missile]

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…or even among the horrors of the American Civil War. [Civil War re-enactment]

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The Civil War is exactly where Stephen Crane takes us in The Red Badge of Courage.

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But would it ruin it if we told you that Stephen Crane never even went to war? [Stephen Crane watching re-enactments on couch]

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Brace yourself, because that’s exactly what we’re going to do: Stephen Crane never even

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went to war.

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Does that fact change your view of the book and its celebrated realism?

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Some people are miffed. They think authors who haven't experienced war shouldn't write [actor gets tomato thrown at them]

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about it, especially from such a personal angle.

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Everything in Red Badge of Courage is filtered through Henry Fleming’s eyes, but how can

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someone who never lived through it know what those eyes saw? [Crane holds two eyeballs on strings]

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From a perspective that close, it’s impossible to tell where Crane’s knowledge ends and

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his embellishments begin. [zombie walks across screen]

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But maybe those sticklers are just killjoys in general.

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See, there’s another camp that doesn’t care Crane never fought a battle in his life.

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Tolkien never went to Middle-Earth, as far as we know. [Tolkien throws ring into lava]

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And Henry Fleming may be fictional, but the thoughts and feelings he’s having are super

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authentic. What matters is that Crane changed the way

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we think about war. [Civil War re-enactment]

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He showed us the harsh reality of battle through the eyes of soldier, instead of a distant

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birds-eye view that made the whole thing seem kind of poetic.

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We don’t know about you, but we fail to see the beauty of living in a trench filled

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with mud, blood, body parts, and disease.

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Does the fact that Stephen Crane never went to war invalidate his work?

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Or does it hardly matter? Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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