Red Badge Of Courage And The Thin

Red Line Essay, Research Paper

I recently watched The Thin Red Line. Not the new, 1998 version however; accidentally picked up the 1964 black and white picture. The story line and plot going on in the movie is very hard to understand, and I read very different from the book The Thin Red Line, but I got the main gist of it.

The main character in the movie is a very young solider and the sergeant of the company they are in. The movie starts off on a naval ship and the sergeant is yelling at the solider because he needs to finish his orders. The Japanese attack the ship and the next day are found on land. When they arrive, the soldier kills the first Japanese in the company. He is shocked at himself, and after ravaging the mans body, he breaks down and cries. Everyone tries to comfort him, but it is as if the man has gone insane. He recovers soon however, or so it seems. The soldier is told that the man he killed is just like a piece of meat, and his number has come up. The soldier then has a nightmare about when his number will come up. The soldier is now scared of dying, after the brief fight with the Japanese soldier earlier.

The movie goes on, with some more encounters with Japanese soldiers. The young solider disobey his orders many times. He thinks that he will be the safe one, because he is thinking for himself and not doing what everyone else is doing. The sergeant yells at him, and tells him to watch out. The soldier becomes one of the very good soldiers however, almost by disobeying everyone s commands. The movie ends with the sergeant dying for the soldier, and when the soldier asks why he replies because I was stupid. The sergeant who has always hated the soldier actually dies for him in the end.

The main purpose I got out of the movie was the quote; There is a thin red line between the sane and the insane. That is refereed mainly to war I am guessing. When you are out there fighting you have no time to think about other soldiers, your enemy s. Sometimes people just kill and kill almost like they are a robot. In the end, you can barley tell who is still sane of all the people.

There are some, but few similarities between The Thin Red Line and Red Badge of Courage. In Red Badge of Courage it talked a lot about how angry and crazy the soldiers can get, and how some of them just run out there to kill. For example, in the last half of the book Chapter 23, He himself felt the daring spirit of a savage, religion-mad .He plunged like a mad horse at it. The soldiers rush in a “frenzy,” “moblike and

barbaric,” with “mad enthusiasm,” in a “delirium.” All these quotes show how in some parts the soldiers become almost insane, and don t know what their object is anymore. In The Thin Red Line, the Captain tells the main character how there is Only a Thin Red Line between the sane and the insane.

The two main characters in each book and movie go a little crazy at first. In The Thin Red Line, the soldier goes insane and kills the Japanese soldier 10 times before he stops. In Red Badge of Courage, ..The young soldier charges forward

again, he runs “like a madman,” his mouth dripping saliva. Both depict scenes of the craziness and insanity of war. Although in The Thin Red Line, the main character doesn t run away in the first battle, he gets very scared and concerned. Like Henry, he thinks that they re all going out there like an execution; the government it sending them there to be killed and slaughtered. In the end however both characters become heroes. Maybe not famous, but within there regiment they both accomplish major goals. Henry, overcomes most of his fears of battle, and in The Thin Red Line, the main character takes over command after the sergeant dies in combat. These are some of the similarities between Red Badge of Courage and the Thin Red Line.