Review: 'The Red Badge of Courage' by Stephen Crane

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

'The Red Badge of Courage' by Stephen Crane, 180 pages - Instagram @c_reads_books

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The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane tells the story of Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier fighting in the American Civil War. Although Henry joined the army in hopes of glory, when the fighting is about to begin, he becomes worried about his strength and courage in the face of war. He is jealous of the other soldiers who have a wound, wearing a “red badge of courage,” as he wishes he could have one to prove that he is not so cowardly as to run away from battle. In order to survive the war, Henry has to prove himself while discovering who truly is.

I didn’t really care for this book. Nothing about it stands out to me in either a positive or a negative way. I liked the internal conflict within Henry contrasting with the external conflict of the war all around him. Besides this though, to be quite honest, I found the book fairly boring and not very captivating. While reading it, I often found myself drifting off so that I would have read ten pages without recollecting one thing that had happened within them. For a war book, it felt very uninteresting to me, not to say that it was uneventful though. I just found it difficult to pay attention and didn’t particularly care for any of the characters all that much. Overall, I did not hate this book, just didn’t particularly love it either.