Crane's concept of heroism : satire in the war stories of Stephen Crane

Abstract

This study examines Stephen Crane's use of satire in The Little Regiment, "Death and the Child", "An Episode of War", Wounds in the Rain, "Spitzbergen Tales", and The Red Badge of Courage in order to understand more fully both Crane's concept of heroism and the war stories themselves. This study assumes that a satiric attack or criticism implies a satiric victim; that a satiric fiction suggests historical particulars in disguise; that norms or standards imply a social milieu; and that rhetoric techniques may identify and reinforce the attack. Crane wrote his war fiction to illustrate and examine a priori beliefs. A consideration of this entire canon of war fiction allows us to identify patterns of action and belief consistently affirmed or negated. These patterns reveal Crane's own relatively unambiguous ideals of heroism, especially in The Red Badge of Courage, and an increasingly bitter Juvenalian satire directed toward the absurdity of the romantic notion of heroism, earned by an obeisance to an outrageous war code which instigates and fosters foolhardy courage and an unquestioning obedience to duty. The earlier and later war fictions are uniquely reciprocal in confirming the main objective of Crane's satire, to criticize in order to correct. As the earlier war fictions, whose attack is implicit, indicate Crane's moral norms, so the later war fictions, which furnish a direct and incisive attack, depend upon the earlier fiction to delineate Crane's authentic position. In its purest form Crane's concept of heroism embraces a selfless kindness or sacrificial compassion for all men. However, Crane desired not only to express his own concerns but also to guide the reader's thought in plumbing the depths of "truth in life," whose constituents including kindness, compassion, humility, brotherhood, and honor. To Crane this truth is the heroic ideal which man uses to verify his manhood or maturity. Heroism, then, is the ethical application of all men's moral commitment. Hence, Crane's war fiction is informed by an ethical perspective; Crane's method is satire; and Crane's derision is aimed at those characters and readers who lack the ethical sensibility manifested in his heroic ideal.