Red Badge of Courage and Nabokov on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

One of the easiest ways to understand how literature can implicitly function as propaganda in the service of the powerful is to imagine Henry Fleming, the main character of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage, if he had chosen to return home following his desertion rather than stay with the military. Crane's novel is a shameless piece of propaganda glorifying war by actively maintaining the myth that refusing to engage in state-sanctioned murder is somehow ethically wrong. If Fleming had escaped battle and gone home to live in peace instead of buying into this myth, his story would have been progressive, disruptive, and would have ultimately served to elevate the American consciousness by celebrating a disavowal of war and violence. However, Crane chose to write a story that comfortably fit into the assumption that war is...
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