The Power of Description in The Red Badge of Courage The main topic of The Red Badge of Courage is fear and how it would affect a young man in a war bloody, like The Civil War. War becomes the young soldier's worst nightmare, giving him conflicting thoughts, emotions and fears. The young character soon realizes that all these things affect him emotionally and physically, that the war is very different from what he had hoped it would be. Although the soldier becomes nervous and even runs away during the Battle of Chancellorsville, he eventually returns to find that he and his fellow soldiers have grown up. They had learned more about themselves than they ever thought possible. The young soldier becomes a man full of courage by the end of this book. When we first meet Henry with his regiment, the 304th New York, he is bored and even lonely and longs to return to the farm. As his time at camp passes, Henry begins to realize that being a hero in war may not be as easy as he once dreamed. The internal conflict begins with Henry wondering how he will react when the battle begins, whether he will run like a chicken or fight bravely. In the first hard-fought battle Henry fights bravely, but as time passes in the second battle he becomes tired and afraid and flees from the enemy and his fears. He ends up rationalizing his fear with the fact that he knew the regiment would lose. However he soon discovers that they have won and begins to run faster at the thought of backing out of the battle. This only increases Henry's internal emotional conflict with himself. Henry finally returns to his regiment with a wound from a rock and says he was wounded while fighting for another regiment. As Henry runs into the woods away from the battle, we learn more about the character on an emotional level and what he's like on the inside and not just on the outside. As Henry emotionally struggles with himself and fears the ongoing battle he ran away from, he learns more about himself and begins the process of growing up. Henry encounters many things during his escape from reality that make his travels even more difficult. One of those things is when he finds a corpse that has been there for quite some time, now described grotesquely by Crane. Young Henry also sees nature as he has never seen it before. From the point of view of a great fear that took over his entire body. He ends up looking at nature with a newfound respect that he had never known before. At one point he sees a squirrel running busily through the forest. Henry throws a pine cone at the little animal and as he runs away he begins to tell himself that his escape was just like that of the squirrels. He felt that the fear was too great and ran away. In the forest, Henry begins to think about the things that are important to him. Even more powerful in his mind is the fact that all he wanted to be was a hero and he ran away from this opportunity. His emotional conflict becomes so strong and Crane engages the reader so much that the reader begins to feel the pain and suffering that Henry is dealing with inside. Even more powerful than all of Henry's fearful thoughts, though, was his fear of being teased by the other soldiers. The strongest literary element in this book is Crane's descriptive power. Throughout the book Crane uses these descriptions to keep the reader engaged and interested. It would seem that Crane makes sure that everything that young soldier Henry sees on his journey you see too, from his exact point of view. The description Crane uses throughout the book.