Use of Color in Cranes The Red Badge of Courage Essay

Use of Color in Cranes The Red Badge of Courage The Red Badge of Courage uses both 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, Penguin ed., 1983). Crane uses color in his descriptions of the physical and the metaphysical and allows color to take on meanings ranging from the†¦show more content†¦Obviously, the fires are red. But Fleming characterizes the blazes as the enemys 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). Flemings metaphysical images of war, in all of their forms, are essentially red. First there is the aforementioned red animal, war, the blood swollen god (71). This icon, for Fleming, rules over and feasts on the battles. Battles themselves are a crimson roar; the screams, the gunfire, the killing sounds red to Fleming. In the same way, the historical battles set forth in the Iliad, the Aenid, and other texts read as crimson blotches on the pages of the past (103, 46). The red world of battle is much like the red world of Hell. Crane seems to make this connection with a prisoners curse for his captors: He consigned them to the red regions.Show MoreRelated Stephen Cranes Red Badge of Courage Essay1237 Words   |  5 PagesStephen Cranes Red Badge of Courage   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When reading the Red Badge of Courage, it is necessary to understand the symbolism that Stephen Crane has created throughout the whole book. Without understanding the true intent of color use, this book loses a meaningful interpretation that is needed to truly understand the main character, his feelings and actions. 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