Summary Of Looking Backwards By Shanaha Shanahan

Shanahan goes into depth describing how the main character, named Henry is based on a friend that Stephen Crane had that went to war and returned to the United States after being away for twenty one years and how much the country had changed in the time that he was gone. Shanahan relates the book, The Red Badge Of Courage to two other books; one being Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and the other being Caesar’s Column by Ignatius Donnelly. Looking Backwards is about a future society that mechanization has been tamed and competition has transformed into a cooperation. Caesar’s Column is about a oligarchical dictatorship that has harnessed modern miracles of modern mechanization. These books relate to The Red Badge of Courage because they both have to do with a the army as one of the overriding images that are developed to be most important.
When Henry’s friend Jim Conklin is killed and the representation of his death is also brought up, “Even the death of his friend, Jim Conklin, takes on a machine-like quality...Conklin’s body is like some engine wheezing and sputtering jerkily to a final halt”(Shanahan). He also mentions about the reference Crane makes when the regiment is near its own death, “a machine run down” (91). Like the other two stories Crane uses mechanical imagery to show the reader the technical transitions of america through industrialization. Another reference is on the first battle scene when more machine imagery appears, Crane says, “he was working at his weapon like a automatic affair” (31); soon the entire regiment “wheezed and banged with might power”