A Portrayal of Soldiers at War in Slaughterhouse-Five and The Red Badge of Courage through Two Contradictory Concepts of Escapism and Heroism

The research focuses on depicting the life of two pivotal soldiers struggling to cope with the stress and horrors of war in terms of escapism and heroism which ensues from a comparative approach between Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage. The paper attempts to show how the main character, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five grapples while experiencing war incompetently and unpreparedly to ultimately discover his comfort zone through mental diversion from unpleasant aspects of his daily life instead of performing his duty to triumph over the enemy. Whereas in The Red Badge of Courage, the protagonist, Henry Fleming who is enlisted in the military service with his determination and heroic ambition tackles and escapes while seeking courage to fight in the battlefield in order to maintain a good reputation as a duty-bound, fearless and confident soldier. Furthermore, through the close-reading of key scenes and by relying on a thorough analysis of war experiences of the two protagonists in the addressed books, the characters’ aspirational endeavors, and the authors’ non-identical views of the war come to surface as they portray a soldier-like personality, one with idealized notions of glory and heroism whereas the other one representing the senselessness of war. The contrasting reactions of the two central characters towards the war offer stimulating areas for discussion and arouse controversial opinions about the behavior of the presuming war heroes and escapists and how they are attained. As a result of the characters’ dissimilar preferences in shaping their outer and inner personality in public and private life, the research demonstrates how they endeavour desperately to achieve this aim by feeding their brains with different ingredients. Billy, on the one hand, chooses to fight the pointless battle with his own imagination to ease his mind from the harsh reality, and on the other hand, Fleming tortures his mind with his heroic thoughts to win the battle while suffering from an internal conflict.