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The Red Badge of Courage






(1894)

The Red Badge of Courage is the coming-of-age story of a young man who, against his mother’s wishes, joins the army in order to achieve the glory and adventure he has been told about through the stories about war that he hears while growing up in his hometown. Much to his shock and dismay, he discovers—as he witnesses his comrades fall in battle—that war is dirty, dangerous, exhausting, and a source of despair. In the heat of battle his courage is tested, and he fails. Fortunately, he is given a second chance, and he summons the courage to fight bravely and to present himself in his own eyes and the eyes of others as a “good man.” Crane presents a story of challenges, outrages, despair, and courage.

Written from the third-person limited point of view, the novel follows the youth and shares with us his shock and confusion at discovering the terror and ugliness of battle. We witness his self-doubts, his running away, and his final ascension into manhood. Early in the novel the youth, Henry Fleming, feels self-doubts that fill him with fear: Will he stand brave and fight in battle, or will he run? He hints at these fears in conversations with his comrades, hoping to find a companion with whom he can commiserate. However, the other soldiers scoff at the idea, and the youth feels alone: His failure to discover any mite of resemblance in their view points made him more miserable than before. No one seemed to be wrestling with such a terrific personal problem. He was a mental outcast.

His greatest fear is then realized when he enters combat and flees from the line of battle. The reader runs with the youth and follows his feelings from fear of mortal suffering and destruction to a desperate rationalization of his actions. He throws a pinecone at a squirrel, and the squirrel runs: “There was the law, he said. Nature had given him a sign”. He then meets up with wounded soldiers of another regiment and faces his fear of being discovered: “He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow”. He becomes envious of the wounded: “He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage”.

The youth does get his red badge, but, ironically, it occurs outside combat. Although he is still fearful, the youth’s curiosity and sense of duty keep him near the front lines. Soldiers are running “hither and thither”. He pulls the arm of one soldier to ask for information about the course of the combat, and when the frantic man swings around, his rifle catches the youth’s head and knocks him to the ground. The youth’s first thought is concern about his wound, but then he is surprised and comforted by the assumption of other soldiers that he received the wound in battle. One ties up his head in a large handkerchief, but a red stain from the wound bleeds through. He has his badge of courage: “He was a picture of an exhausted soldier after a feast of war”.

Irrationally bolstered by the confidence others have expressed in him, the youth determines to stand firm in his next battle: “He was not going to be badgered all of his life, like a kitten chased by boys, he said”. Unlike his previous encounter with battle, when he was altogether too conscious of peril, on this occasion he descends into a semiconscious, brute state where he is consumed by primal fury, “his eyes burning hatefully, and his teeth set in a cur-like snarl”. In this fierce frame of mind, he loses himself in battle; he is “not conscious that he is erect upon his feet”. He continues shooting even after the others have ceased. The youth considers himself a “barbarian” and a “beast”; these observations are cut short, however, when he and a friend overhear an officer calling his regiment, dismissing them in degrading terms as “mule drivers”. Nevertheless, this affront increases the youth’s resolve to prove the officer wrong.

The youth becomes caught up in the emotional madness of the next encounter with the enemy: “Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness, for this flag which was near him”. When the color sergeant falters, the youth and his friend grab the flag and grapple for it. The youth wrenches it and carries it forward in battle. His posture suggests patriotic zeal and dedication to his fellows, but in reality he is motivated by a wish to change the attitudes of his comrades. Most specifically, he wants to prove his worth in the eyes of the officer who had called his regiment a mule driver, but his regiment pulls back too soon, and their retreat is “a march of shame to him”. The larger principles of the conflict are lost to him, and he fights purely to prove his mettle in the moment. For him, the minuscule details of his present circumstance become all-encompassing.

Looking over the landscape traversed in the battle, the youth is astonished at its meager size: “He discovered that the distances, as compared with the brilliant measurings of his mind, were trivial and ridiculous”. Nevertheless, the youth soon hears that his lieutenant had commended him as a “very good man t’ have, ” and the youth feels a “serene self-confidence”. This self-confidence slowly hardens into savage determination: “He himself felt the daring spirit of a savage religion-mad. He was capable of profound sacrifices, a tremendous death”. He puts his passion to the challenge in the next battle when he carries the colors into battle and captures the enemy flag: “He plunged like a mad horse at it. He was resolved it should not escape if wild blows and darings of blows could seize it”.

After the battle settles, the youth reflects on his new understanding: He understood then that the existence of shot and counter-shot was in the past. He had dwelt in a land of strange, squalling upheavals and had come forth. He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion, and he was escaped. His first thoughts were given to rejoicings at this fact. Crane’s language encourages the perception that survival is primary and that conduct on the field of battle has little to do with moral principles or service to a glorious cause.

Finally, as the troops march slowly toward other possible battles, the youth feels a “quiet manhood”. He shares with the reader a new acceptance of himself: He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace. Manhood, as described here, is not a noble state achieved through the crucible of war, but the endurance of a “red sickness” that reduced Henry to brute instinct. Similarly, the peace for which he has discovered new appreciation is not a vision founded on enhanced moral sensitivity, but a nostalgic yearning for life he risked losing by putting his safety in jeopardy. This is not a bold new world with enhanced rights for all citizens or the dream of a newly unified nation but a wish to regain the calm he knew before the storm of war. Crane gives little evidence of personal growth or cultural progress.

Crane was trained as a reporter and, as such, was practiced in third-person objective point of view. A reporter’s point of view could have named the battles and troop movements and enumerated the lists of casualties. However, it is the expanded third person limited point of view that allows us access to the youth’s thoughts and fears. It is access to these thoughts that allows our identification with the youth and our ability to see the confusion, terror, and ugliness of battle, and that allows us to experience the change in the youth as he accepts himself and the imperfections of his world. Our awareness of the limited scope of his thought compels us to arrive at our own independent assessment of his true moral condition.

As stated previously, realism, in its most basic sense, attempts to depict life as it really is. It shows the blemishes as well as the goodness that life offers. Consider the following passage from The Red Badge of Courage, in which young Henry announces to his mother that, against her wishes, he has joined the army: When he had returned home his mother was milking the brindle cow. Four others stood waiting. “Ma, I’ve enlisted, ” he said to her diffidently. There was a short silence. “The Lord’s will be done, Henry, ” she had finally replied, and had then continued to milk the brindle cow.

Henry joined the army with visions of grandeur and patriotic zeal, to which his mother’s simple, resigned reply is not the response he has hoped to evoke. A few sentences later, he is further disappointed in the mundane atmosphere of his own departure from home: Still, she had disappointed him by saying nothing whatever about returning with his shield or on it. He had privately primed himself for a beautiful scene. He had prepared certain sentences which he thought could be used with touching effect. But her words destroyed his plans. She had doggedly peeled potatoes and addressed him as follows: “You watch out, Henry, an’ take good care of yerself in this here fighting business—you watch out, an’ take good care of yerself. Don’t go a-thinkin’ you can lick the hull rebel army at the start, because yeh can’t. Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh’ve got to keep quiet an’ do what they tell yeh. I know how you are, Henry.”

This quiet scene may seem superfluous within a story of battles fought for national glory and individual rights, but it puts the main character and protagonist Henry in context. As readers, we see how inflated his expectations are, and we sense that his imaginative life has not prepared him for what lies ahead. These realistic details, including the use of dialect, show Henry to be a simple, young boy with unrealistic dreams and a romantic vision of war. They also foreshadow the discoveries that he will soon make regarding the chaos of war and his small role in it.

Toward the middle of the novel, Henry wanders into a circle of trees that arch above him and form a sort of chapel in which he finds a dead soldier. Here Crane uses objective description to intensify not the glory of dying courageously but the horror of dying alone: The corpse was dressed in a uniform that had once been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.

Henry discovers more images of death, and these are also expressed with simple, realistic language: He came to a fence and clamored over it. On the far side, the ground was littered with clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up, lay in the dirt. A dead soldier was stretched, with his face hidden in his arm. Farther off was a group of four or five corpses keeping mournful company. A hot sun had blazed upon the spot.

Scenes like these confirm the observation that writers in the realist tradition describe the “common, the average, the everyday”. Realistic detail in The Red Badge of Courage allows Crane to portray not the glory of war but the impact of the horror of war on the common man.

Although realistic in many aspects, The Red Badge of Courage is not known simply as a realistic novel. Crane goes beyond realism to develop a form of writing new to his generation: impressionism. An approach first developed by painters such as Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir, impressionism entered literature as a manner of writing concerned not just with the objective observation of a subject but with the way the world is “ seen or felt to be by the impressionist or character in a single moment. The impressionistic writer employs highly selective details, the ‘brush strokes’ of sense-data that can suggest impressions”. Crane achieves this sort of impressionism when he selects a few soldiers and battles, mostly unnamed, to represent the Civil War in The Red Badge of Courage. Selective marches and battles are seen through the eyes of one soldier, Henry Fleming, who is most often referred to as simply “the youth.” Although realistic detail is also provided, Crane often makes use of vivid imagery and metaphors and similes to suggest the impressions the war makes upon the youth.

This is perhaps most vividly seen through Crane’s use of animal imagery to portray the savage aspects of war. At a particularly memorable moment he describes the regiment as “one of those moving monsters wending with many feet”. The campfires are seen as “red eyes across the river... growing larger, as the orbs of a row of dragons advancing”. The onslaught is described in terms of “redoubtable dragons.” The enemy advance is “like a ruthless hunting.” Individual fighters are similarly described: “The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, ” and “the fighters resembled animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit”. The four prisoners of war are “trapped strange birds.” The youth’s own columns of infantry are “huge crawling reptiles” like “two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night” that move with “the sinuous movement of a serpent”. As the youth’s regiment pummels the enemy in one skirmish, the opposing line is described in similarly impressionistic fashion: “The blue smoke-swallowed line curled and writhed like a snake stepped upon”. War itself is repeatedly referred to as an evil, beastlike god: “War, the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god”.

When the youth runs from battle, it is with animal-like imagery: “He ran like a rabbit” and “he was like a proverbial chicken”. The youth’s later determination to stand against the enemy is described in catlike images: “He was not going to be badgered of his life, like a kitten chased by boys, he said. It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws”. His lieutenant uses similar images to describe him after the battle: “By heavens, if I had ten thousand wild cats like you I could tear th’ stomach outa this war in less’n a week! ”.

In addition to the animal imagery, Crane occasionally uses the imagery of machinery to describe the war’s unfeeling, dehumanizing production of corpses: “The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go close and see it produce corpses”.

Finally, Crane’s verbal brushstrokes use color imagery to evoke the ugliness of battle and the mourning of nature at the outrageousness of man’s ventures into war. Red, of course, evokes images of danger, death, and bloodshed. The war is described as “the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god, ” and battles are “crimson blotches on the pages of the past”. On the first page of the novel, the youth sees the “red, eyelike gleam of hostile campfires”. Later on, these “red eyes” peer through the night. At best, the campfires are “red, peculiar blossoms”. When the youth fires his weapon in battle, he falls into the “red rage” of a “driven beast”. The bloodshed seems to block the very color of the sun: “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer”. Later, when the fighting ceases, the sun shines “bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky”.

The color yellow appears frequently (17 times) in the novel, almost always associated with the sickness, decay, and sorrow of war. “From across the river, the red eyes were still peering. In the eastern sky there was a patch of yellow rug laid for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and patternlike, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse”. Later, “the clouds were tinged an earth-like yellow in the sun rays and in the shadow were a sorry blue”. In the chapel scene with the dead soldier, yellow is used to express the decay of the soldier’s mouth: “Its red had changed to an appalling yellow”. The musketry is described as “level belchings of yellow flame that caused an inhuman whistling in the air” and later as “yellow tongues”.

When the youth leaves for war, he goes with visions of adventure and glory. Gold and purple have been traditionally associated with images of glory and royalty, but in this novel they evoke darker emotions. In his first march the youth notices that the uniforms “glowed a deep purple hue, ” and at night the “columns changed to purple streaks”. “The lines of the forest were long purple streaks”. One huge soldier was “quite purple with rage”. After their victory in battle, Henry views his triumphant fellow soldiers’ marching “in wide purple and gold, ” but privately, “this vision of cruelty brooded over him. It clung near him always and darkened his view of these deeds in purple and gold”.

One of the more prominent colors used in the novel is blue; this is seen especially through the description of the Union army as a “blue demonstration”. On one level, the blue demonstration is simply the marching in formation of the Union army. On another level, however, it enforces the sense of hope—of clear blue skies that reflect a sense of shared purpose and the unified effort to bring about positive change that will soon be contrasted with the ugliness of actual war. As the youth’s anticipation of adventure and glory diminishes and he begins to see the war in its all ugliness, the blue of the uniforms changes. At first the “blue of the line was crusted with steel color, and the brilliant flags projected”. Then, after weathering the enemy onslaught, the blue is suddenly brittle: “The brittle blue line had withstood the blows and won”. As the battles wear on, Crane presents the blue of the uniform as fading in proportion to the youth’s disenchantment: “The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green” and “the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body” while a “blue desperate figure” led “lurid charges, ” a “blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault”. Later, when victory is uncertain, the enemy “began briskly to slice up the blue men, ” and “grunting bundles of blue began to drop.” In desperation, “It was a blind and despairing rush by the collection of men in dusty and tattered blue”. Other references to blue refer to a clear sky, seen only in lulls between battles, or to the solemn business of war and bloodshed: “The blue smoke-swallowed line curled and writhed, ” and “Behind them blue smoke curled and clouded above the treetops”.

The color blue also contributes to Crane’s naturalistic scenes where he magnifies the indifference of nature that receives particular attention between and after pivotal skirmishes. For example, after one battle, “As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the trees and fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment”. At the end of the novel it seems that nature wants merely to wash away the remembrances of the war and then return to its more ordinary condition: “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds”. What then, has been accomplished by the war?

 


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