"Cliff Notes - Red Badge of Courage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

create a novel that would forever change the way Americans wrote
about war? One answer might be that he copied the style of a
European novelist. In fact, European writing in the 1890s was
beginning to change in some exciting ways. Two French writers,
Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, published novels that outraged
proper people. Zola in particular wrote in a way that people
found brutal and shocking. He wrote about prostitutes and coal
miners, people who did not appear in the novels of the day. And
he tried to show that people were in the grip of
forces--heredity, environment, and instinct--that they could not
control. Some modern critics have claimed that Zola's novel La
Debacle was one inspiration for The Red Badge of Courage.
Stephen Crane had read some of Zola's novels--in English, since
his French wasn't that good--and he knew about La Debacle,
although nobody knows for sure whether he read the novel or only
a review of it. War and Peace and Sebastapol, both by the
Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, have also been named as possible
sources for The Red Badge of Courage. Again, Crane may have
read the books, but he also may have read only reviews.

Crane liked to read, and in high school he had enjoyed
nineteenth-century British novels and the Greek and Roman
classics. But he was always more interested in two other
things: playing baseball and acting rowdy--drinking beer,
playing cards, smoking, and swearing, all the things that would
have made his minister father turn over in his grave. It
doesn't seem likely that Stephen Crane would have been inspired
by other people's books.

Baseball and being tough were probably what helped Crane
imagine what war was like. In fact, Crane once said, "I believe
that I get my sense of the rage of conflict on the football
field. The psychology is the same." Actually, baseball was
Crane's sport. He was an excellent player, and loved to show
off by playing without a glove. Crane claimed that when he was
at boarding school, a place called Claverack College on the
Hudson River in New York State, "I never learned anything. But
heaven was sunny blue and no rain fell on the diamond when I was
playing baseball." When Crane went to college (despite its name,
Claverack was a high school), first at Lafayette College in
Easton, Pennsylvania, and then at Syracuse University in
Syracuse, New York, the amount of time he spent playing baseball
contributed to his flunking out.

Crane wasn't being fair to Claverack. He learned something
there, something about being a soldier. For Claverack was a
military academy, and Crane's mother had sent him there because
the only thing he loved more than baseball was playing soldier.
(Once, as a boy in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Crane had gotten so
involved in a game of war that he buried a friend in the sand.)