From The Red Badge of Courage

I once again read the first page of this story and read about what we are in now. Instead of doing the Realism period we are going to do Naturalism now. Here is a quote from the first paragraph of this page, "Toward the end of the 1800's, however, a group of writers known as Naturalists, who were strongly influenced by Charles Darwin's scientific theory of evolution by natural selection, adopted the view that people had little control over their own lives" (492). I typed this quote in because it tells the reader, or us, about Naturalism. Naturalism is about how people have little control over their own lives (492). This sort of relates back to Thoreau and his writings in his story "Civil Disobedience" and how people are shaped by the behaviors that they present (Thoreau). That is what I found when I started to read the story "From The Red Badge of Courage."

I did not really understand this story at first. When I read it a second time I started to put the Naturalism period and the story together. It was about a middle class soldier who went through war as a "colorful" way. Crane described how the soldier had filled up with anger and went on the battle field and went through all the soldiers and how using his hands would have been better to satisfy his blood lust (Crane 493). This is the same as Thoreau because they both believed "human destiny was shaped by powerful forces, including heredity, social and economic pressures, and the natural environment" (Crane 492). I typed this quote because I found it interesting as to what naturalist believed in and this helped me put together the story and everything else in between. The story "from the Red Badge of Courage" it had a lot of Naturalistic things involved in it and it made the story that much more interesting. Overall, this story had a lot to do with Thoreau's writings and they both were Naturalists.

Bibliography

Crane, Stephen. "from The Red Badge of Courage." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 492-493. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - with Annotated Text." The Thoreau Reader. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.