Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T05:14:40.384Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - “He Was a Man”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Get access

Summary

Widely familiar novels, like Tom Jones or Emma or Great Expectations, create for us a long-standing and influential tradition of narratives patterned as “education,” as growth and development. No inherent necessity requires these accounts of maturation to end in self-knowledge, resolution, and responsible adulthood, but they commonly do. For Tom Jones or Emma Woodhouse this becomes a happy consummation; for the Pip of Dickens's novel, it is also a greater, but in his case a sadder, wisdom. A specialized version of such an influential pattern has been called the “realistic war novel” – Tolstoy's Sebastopol (1854–5, translated 1887) is offered as the early example. With this, so it has been argued, there was “established a new generic plot convention: growth from cowardice and inexperience to courage and manhood.”

The seemingly direct statements of Henry Fleming's state of mind at the end of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, particularly in its original book form (1895), would appear to be in this vein. Together with the expectations that have accrued with so powerful a novelistic tradition, these statements make it easy to understand why the large majority of readers has so understood the implications of Fleming's two days in battle. Even if a few perceptive readers were rueful in nothing the relative cost of young Henry's sensitivity, a regretful depersonalization, they could still accept the thesis of transformation.

Some, however, have found apparent contradictions and discrepanies between these concluding assertions in Fleming's thought regarding his gained maturity and the pervasive irony that hitherto has undercut his mind's working.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×