And Henry looks at the world at him in a different way. He now thinks of himself as a "man" who has gone through something horrible and survived. He moves toward the ray of sun. Not everyone agrees about the ending. Some think that it is positive, because Henry has been in war and learned how to accept it and be brave. Others feel that he is again lying to himself. He is telling himself that he was able to cope, when he really did not. Those who believe the second ending, say the world away from war is not sunny and carefree. Henry still is a young man living with his dreams. Can he really forget the horrors and think he is a hero?

Crane is saying that even living from day-to-day in the natural world is very complicated and difficult, even without the horrible aspects of war. Even though Henry is blinded by "a golden ray of sun" that breaks through the clouds, his world will not be perfect from now on. His dreams will end and he will see the real world. Part of him will always remember the horrible things that he saw in the battles and how he lied. Maybe he can continue to lie to himself. May he can't.

No matter what the ending means, the rest of the book is very clear. It tells in a lot of detail how horrible war is. The book has little detail about the locations and soldiers, such as "the youth," so it can be any one fighting in any war, from the Civil War to the one that is in Iraq today. Without some detail about the characters, the readers become the soldiers. They begin to walk in the shoes of the infantry and become part of the battles.

The beginning "And at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness,...

They see disease, injury and death. They either are numb at what they see or will go crazy and come home with shell shock and with mental problems.
Henry] vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question." The question is what is the purpose of this death, if anything? Does anyone win in a war or are both sides losers and one side only losing somewhat less than the other?

This is what makes The Red Badge of Courage such a good book more than a century after Crane wrote it. At first it may seem that the book is about the war between the Union and the Confederate soldiers. But today it is really about the soldiers in World War I, World War II, Viet Nam, Korea and the many other wars fought in the past and now in the world.

Crane was the first to write about what war was really like. The characters are not heroes and brave soldiers, but just men with guns who are fighting because they are afraid to die. Henry's mind is in the "tumult of agony and despair" like any person who sees death around him. That is why the Red Badge of Courage is not a "happy ever after" book like a fairy tale, but a sad story about the terrible things about war.

Book Cited:

Red Badge of Courage. (1895). Retrieved from website on October 3, 2005. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CRANE/title.html