Red Badge of Courage Many

Red Badge of Courage

Many books are written about the Civil War. Yet one classic, not even 200 pages long, still remains one of the best on the subject. This is the Red Badge of Courage. When Stephen Crane wrote this book in 1895, he was an unknown author. It quickly became a best seller, with 14 editions in one year. It has also never been out of print. Although he never was in the war, Crane's descriptions are so true to life that the reader goes right into the battlefields. His book talks about not only the Civil War but all wars.

Like many young men, even those of today, the main character Henry Fleming learns of the war in his country and thinks only of the glory of being part of such an event. Although his mother clearly objects because she knows the horror of war, he enlists in the Union Army. It does not take long for Henry to realize that he does not know his own strengths and weaknesses. Will he be fearful if approached by the enemy? Will he be brave and a hero? Throughout the book, Henry's thoughts and emotions go back and forth between the wonders of war that he imagines and the reality in front of him where men "drop like sacks of laundry."

He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life -- of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles.

Chapter 1)

His fears also go back and forth. Will he run away like a coward? Or will he be brave and fight and have a chance of being injured or killed? He wishes he had a wound too, a "red badge of courage" (chapter 9). When he does run away, he fears the comments and hatred of the other men. When returning to camp, he is saved. No one knew he had run away, and he could now prove himself. Henry finds other wounded men to walk with, but he now thinks that his shame must be visible.

Crane does not show Henry as a trained soldier who knows how to fight and win a war. He is seen as a beginner who fights to prove his courage, not because he believes in the war. He is pushed by his hatred and acting like an angry animal. In one part, Henry grabs the flag from a dead soldier and runs ahead. He feels excitement and is not upset about the bullets flying around him. He is in a kind of "wild battle madness" (chapter 23). He is not a hero. His "red badge of courage," is only a wound that he receives by accident from a running soldier.

At the end of the book, Henry's thoughts are still confused as in the beginning. "Later he began to study his deeds, his failures, and his achievements. Thus, fresh from scenes where many of his usual machines of reflection had been idle, from where he had proceeded sheeplike, he struggled to marshal all his acts." He remembered how he lied to others and himself about his "wound." specter of reproach came to him. There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered soldier -- he who, gored by bullets and faint of blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field (Chapter 24).

He listens to his friend who says not to recall such thoughts. 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, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp fires set in the low brows of distant hills," tells about the rest of the book.

In the book, as with any war, the soldiers move from one horror to another. 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.