"Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott

I probably wouldn't have read this again for another decade at least if it hadn't been for my first completed quest. Yup, I've started that up again, mostly because I was running out of ideas for things to read. Maybe I'll finally make some headway on it.

This is a classic of slice-of-life, and as such, it is boring as nouns unless you care about the characters. Who did grow on me, eventually, but for the first third or so of the book, it wasn't a terribly enjoyable read.

Now, if you do care about the characters, it's pretty good. Once I got past the first third of the book and got invested in these people's lives, the book went pretty fast.

Oh, and did you know |Beth| doesn't die in this? That's actually in the sequel, also titled Little Women (or Good Wives in Britain), which usually gets smushed together with this one in a single volume. Faced with the daunting prospect of this already long book being twice as long, I decided to just go with the first one.

In case you hadn't guessed, this review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable. Old books are nice like that.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I was three days ago years old [when I wrote this post versus when I published it] when I realized I didn't have a slice-of-life tag on this blog and should probably make one.)

"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane

This is an essay I wrote for a literature class.

[EDIT: Edited to fix the formatting because originally it didn't play nice with text wrapping.]

[EDIT 2: This was because I wrote the essay while on vacation, during which I didn't have a computer with MS Word, so I used Google Docs instead. You'd think Google Docs would play nicer than Word with Blogger given that Docs and Blogger are both made by Google, but no.]

 

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

 

The Red Badge of Courage is primarily a character study of a young recruit in the American Civil War, showing that courage is something you develop, not necessarily an inborn quality. The author uses different literary techniques in order to more effectively get his point across.

The setting is not important to The Red Badge of Courage; for example, it could just as easily be set in World War II, or the Revolutionary War, without much changing the story. The plot, however, is much more integral to the story, as the main character’s journey exemplifies the point Stephen Crane is making. The main character, Henry Fleming, deserts in his first battle, before later returning to the fight in order to appease his conscience. In the subsequent engagements he performs much better under fire, later discovering to his mild shock and elation that he has, after all, not run from the enemy.

The author uses multiple different techniques to enhance the reader’s immersion in the story. He consistently refers to the main character simply as “the youth,” which serves to make the story feel more like a personal experience and less like an isolated narrative. Exactly which Civil War battle the main character participates in is never stated, preventing a reader’s extraneous historical knowledge from interfering with their experience. In addition, the battle narration expertly captures a muddled, somewhat dreamlike or nightmare-like feeling, which contrasts with the more top-down view of battles in other works; in keeping with its status as essentially a character study, it never pulls back from its focus on Henry Fleming to give a broader narration. While phonetically writing out dialectal speech usually detracts from the reader’s ability to understand the story, that very property works in its favor here, adding to the muddled quality described above by placing another layer of obfuscation between the narration and what’s actually happening.

In my opinion, the point of The Red Badge of Courage is that courage, rather than being an inborn quality, is actually developed over time, and often looks different than we expect. The plot supports this: the main character initially deserts, proving he is not innately courageous, but as the story progresses he does show bravery in subsequent fighting, only realizing it after the fact. It also demonstrates that even flawed human beings can still have fortitude, with the main character as the prime example. During the non-battle portions of the narrative, he constantly oscillates between strong–even foolhardy–belief in his own abilities, and at other times a crippling doubt of his performance. When he eventually does prove his courage, though his ego does assert itself upon recollection, in the moment it is not dwelt upon by him or by the narrative. 

In conclusion, The Red Badge of Courage shows that bravery is something we all have to learn and that it is not as dramatic as it appears from the outside. It uses its focused plot and several different literary methods to effectively make this point.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence (it do be a war book).

4 stars.

(Endnote: For those who don't know, a "red badge" is slang for a bullet wound.)

"War on the Frontier: The Trans-Mississippi West" by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

This is a book about the American Civil War, specifically (as the title says) the parts in the Trans-Mississippi West. I don't actually really have anything to say about it, this review is just to point out the unintentional hilarity of a historical picture featured in the book.

This picture was created in 1862 by John Stevens, a sign painter, which may help explain the strangeness. It's reactionary and anti-Native-American and racist, and it was created for fearmongering purposes, so it wasn't intended to be funny...

I had to scan this, so the image quality might be kinda bad.

What I'm pretty sure is supposed to be going on in this picture: Shirtless Guy, after murdering two of Green Woman's children, is trying to murder a third while Green Woman tries to pull her child away. Meanwhile, Blue Kid throws out his arms in an attempt to protect his family.

What it looks like is going on in this picture: Shirtless Guy and Green Woman are having a tug-of-war over a badly-proportioned small child. Green Woman is attempting to Force-push Shirtless Guy, and Blue Kid is T-posing over two of his siblings (or possibly one sibling with a doll) in the background.

 

It was the T-posing that elevated this from "ok weird" to "this is funny and I should make a blog post on it so other people can see how funny it is". John Stevens's history as a sign painter, coupled with the (lack of) artistic quality of the picture, leads me to believe he never actually had any formal training. And probably didn't understand how to pose people so they look realistic (the T-posing kid strikes again) or to draw children so they don't just look like tiny adults.

 

Yes, I know this picture plays into a lot of the prejudices of its time. I'm not laughing at the racism, I'm laughing at the T-posing kid and the woman in green's attempts to use the Force.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: M to AO for graphic violence, like all the war books.

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T15+ for graphic violence (massacres by Native Americans, and massacres of Native Americans--it went both ways--are not pleasant).

4 stars. Informative.

(Endnote: I reviewed The Dreadnoughts because I like dreadnoughts, and I reviewed this because I thought something in it was funny. There's a vast ocean of other books in these series that I haven't reviewed.)