Youth of Red Badge of Courage and Youth of Today

Youth of Red Badge of Courage and Youth of Today

As a young member of today’s society, I don’t fear death. If I did fear death, I would be "dead." There are so many sources of death today, like car wrecks, shootings, drugs, and diseases that if I was constantly afraid of all of them, I couldn’t leave my own backyard. Therefore, I refuse to believe that death will happen to me. In the novel The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, the 19th century youth, like youths of today, is unafraid of death, but his reasoning is different, so he actually welcomes death.

The average youth of today isn’t afraid of death because it seems to happen to other people. Death is distant. Every day, we read about people being killed in this or drowned in that but it never happens to someone we know. If someone we know does die, we are shocked and forced to reconsider our lives because, for an instant, we realize that we could die as well.

Unlike us, the youth in The Red Badge of Courage knows about death first hand, and he is unafraid. When the youth was young, his father died. Through the novel, the youth is fighting in the bloodiest war on American soil and the war that caused the most casualties per capita of any U.S. war. He has seen corpses and walked with dying men. He was trying to help one of his injured friends when his friend died convulsively. Earlier in his experiences, especially when he first encountered fighting, he was immensely afraid of death, so afraid that he ran away from battle. During the passage, and later in the novel, he knows that he could die at any time but he is unapprehensive.

When death does strike a loved one, I feel that it is unfair. "Why," I ask, " Did granny have to die? She was such a kind old woman. Why couldn’t some bum have died instead?" I didn’t want her to die and I feel like she was undeserving of death. Likewise, the youth feels like death is unfair but in just the opposite way. He wishes that death would not fall on the Unknown Soldier, but would fall on him. Like us, he sees death as brought on by luck and being unfair, but unlike us, during this passage, he thinks that death is lucky. He "envied a corpse" "killed by lucky chances," mainly because he desired death and felt that it was unfair that it fell on others less deserving to be killed.

Why did he desire death? He thought that he had lost all of his honor and the only way to regain that honor was to die. He felt that he was the worst person in the world, "the most unutterably selfish man in existence." Earlier in the novel, he ran away from battle and then he went on to wish that the army would lose the battle so he could regroup with his regiment without shame. These thoughts that he "tried to thrust ... away" went against every bit of his honor and training. Naturally, once he had time