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Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE: SCHOLARS WRITE ABOUT OPENING SENTENCES |
| Author: Peter Shaw |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1995 |
| Size: 720 Words, 4,353 Characters |
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The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Setting forth the time of day and laying out the physical setting for a story about war appear to be the purposes of this opening sentence. The lifting fog and rising temperature imply that it is morning, and the resting army is presumably in the middle of a campaign. Somehow, though, the description does not seem compatible with the kind of heroic story implied by the title, The Red Badge of Courage. Instead o...
. . .
... is to be viewed not under the aspect of eternity but simply as a part of diurnal nature. In the scheme of things, the individual man is but part of an insignificant and undifferentiated mass. His largest, most heroic actions are merely lilliputian, exhausting struggles in an indifferent, purposeless universe. The remaining sentences of the book inexorably elaborate the same antiheroic irony.
(550 of 4,353 characters)
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