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.
Keywords— Escape, Escapism, Heroism, Hero, Soldiers, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Red Badge of
Courage, Wars
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