The Red Badge of Courage

“He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity.” 

The 19th-century tendency toward psychological realism in novels is employed here not to explain how behaviors have been performed in the past, nor to explore psychological types or existing phobias. Instead, we find nothing but obscuring cobwebs in Henry’s mind; these will eventually be blown away as mere inconveniences in the call to unthinking action.

“His emotions made him feel strange in the presence of men who talked excitedly of a coming battle as of a drama they were about to witness, with nothing but eagerness and curiosity apparent in their faces.” 

Henry projects emotions and feelings on others he wished he had. In fact, Crane gives us more than enough clues to conclude that the men by Henry’s side are no more or less heroic than he is, and no more prepared for the horror to come.

“And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.” 

Crane’s mission is to explore the realities of warfare and their meanings not to the course of human geopolitics, but to the average soldier who must fight in the fields and trenches. As such, his depiction of battle is explicitly non-heroic.

“Another, the commander of the brigade, was galloping about bawling. His hat was gone and his clothes were awry. He resembled a man who has come from bed to go to a fire.” 

Like the historical and ideological purposes for the war itself, authority figures as embodied by the commander are depicted without reverence but as flesh and blood figures, as witnessed from the perspective of a fighter. The commander on his horse is as swayed and buffeted by the contingencies of battle as any private.

“He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part—a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country—was in a crisis.” 

For an initial moment, Henry becomes the sort of pragmatist Crane admires: not an individual looking out for himself but a member of a larger force, acting not because his logic tells him to but because that is what the greater force is engaged in. Action in that context, not thought, becomes the only morality.

“Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the swirling phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat.” 

In many novels and poems of the 19th century, war was seen from a general’s perspective, with stratagems and company movements explained in explicit terms, as if war were a board game. Here, the war from Henry’s perspective is purely sensual, rendering its witness blind and gasping for breath.

“There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.” 

This is the critical juncture in the formation of Henry’s character, and it is defined not through a set of internal arguments but through blind action. Henry may have given a great deal of thought to whether he’d run in a battle, but none of that matters in the amoral crucible of action. People are defined by actions, Crane says, not by thoughts or moral preconceptions.

“Since he had turned his back on the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified.”

Having chosen his course of action, and having been given time to think those actions over, Henry now redoubles his own mental self-torture. Thoughts become hallucinations., and his imaginary fears, having gone unfaced, redouble.

“His mind heard howls of derision. Their density would not enable them to understand his sharper point of view.” 

The “density,” or stupid insensitivity, of the peers and authorities who define Henry’s success and failure form an ongoing theme in Henry’s self-torturing thought. Henry believes his individual ego to be supreme, and his moments of greatest self-doubt often arrive with a sudden inflation of his own sense of his intelligence and moral character in comparison to others.

“He conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy.”

Both Crane and Henry use the “pathetic fallacy”—the tendency to correlate the state of the world to one’s mental state. For Henry, the state of “Nature” constantly shifts as his mental state shifts. For Crane, however, Nature, as embodied by the Virginia wilderness, is steadfastly an agent of change and confusion to be overcome by human nature.

“Individuals must have supposed that they were cutting the letters of their names deep into everlasting tablets of brass, or enshrining their reputations forever in the hearts of their countrymen, while, as to fact, the affair would appear in printed reports under a weak and immaterial title.” 

Crane wrote at a time of national reconsideration of the Civil War and its legacy. After Reconstruction, the war went from being a bloody and tragic attempt to correct foundational mistakes in the American conception of life and liberty to being a story in which both sides achieved heroic and tragic ends. Crane points out that such a reimagining ignores individual suffering and the role of fate in the legacy-building of war.

“He conceived persons with torn bodies to be particularly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.” 

Here, the mystery of the title is solved: The “red badge of courage” is a gory war wound. The irony is that what Henry wishes at this point in the story, as he wanders through the wilderness hungry and alone, is that his reward could be a swift death and deliverance from his self-doubt.

“The army, helpless in matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill.”

In this scene, Henry puts his own retreat into context. A whole company of men he doesn’t know is shown retreating. In their flight, he sees that there is nothing aberrant in fearing war and death, and no line of mere thinking that justifies bravery in the face of annihilation.

“As they went along, the man questioned the youth and assisted him with replies like one manipulating the mind of a child. Sometimes he interjected anecdotes.” 

The mystery man who leads Henry back to his camp, and toward a second chance at redemption, possesses Christian undertones. He also behaves very much like Crane, who combines the “anecdotes” of a storyteller with the hard reportage of a journalist and, in so doing, guides and shapes the unformed mind lost in the wilderness.

“He showed a quiet belief in his purposes and his abilities. And this inward confidence evidently enabled him to be indifferent to little words of other men aimed at him. Apparently the other had now climbed a peak of wisdom from which he could perceive himself as a very wee thing. And the youth saw that ever after it would be easier to live in his friend’s neighborhood.” 

Wilson takes prominence in the third act of Henry’s redemptive arc. Once known only as “the loud soldier,” Wilson has learned to keep his thoughts to himself and to act as a “friend” and a model to Henry.

“His self-pride was now entirely restored. In the shade of its flourishing growth he stood with braced and self-confident legs, and since nothing could now be discovered he did not shrink from an encounter with the eyes of judges, and allowed no thoughts of his own to keep him from an attitude of manfulness. He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.” 

The dark side of the epistemology of “action before thought” is that actions performed in the dark can be justified as being in the category of thoughts, immaterial and momentary. Henry’s cowardly actions could very well have gotten him court-martialed or worse, yet no one saw them, and so his character remains without reduction. This moral logic would have served him even if he had murdered a comrade in the dark or picked their pockets.

“The noise, following like the yelpings of eager, metallic hounds, increased to a loud and joyous burst, and then, as the sun went serenely up the sky, throwing illuminating rays into the gloomy thickets, it broke forth into prolonged pealings.” 

Crane takes care to include the landscape in his descriptions of events, and the landscape often serves to flavor events in terms of a mirrored violence, beauty, and confusion. What happens in the vastness of the Virginia landscape seems often to reflect the state of Henry’s mind.

“It was revealed to him that he had been a barbarian, a beast. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion. Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy.” 

What would have appeared in Henry’s adolescent mind as sterling heroism is, in fact, an “easy” effect of fighting, one for which the strictures of one religion or another would have no meaning. The rabbit-like behavior that made Henry run away from fighting takes the form of another beast when he stays to fight. No morality need apply to the soldier in an act of war, only the results of action.

“The officer spoke of the regiment as if he referred to a broom. Some part of the woods needed sweeping, perhaps, and he merely indicated a broom in a tone properly indifferent to its fate.” 

Henry’s conversion from youth to adult is not yet complete, as he and Wilson purport to be “shocked” that their lives can be so easily subsumed into the life and death of whole regiments, assigned to a nameless doom.

“His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there.” 

The reader stays within Henry’s perspective and is subjected to his every doubt, even as the battle becomes more desperate and uncertain. However, the development of Henry’s mind in battle is dynamic. His senses, once obscured and choked, now are clear. His own heroism is less of a concern to Henry. There is only the duty before him.

“Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him...Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power.” 

In the narrowing of Henry’s conception of the world, the flag (unnamed by Crane and not described in terms of its color or origin) becomes the single purpose of his existence. He will cling to it until the novel ends, not because of its national symbolic significance, but simply because of its existence as a material object beyond himself. After Henry is dead, the flag will still exist.

“It was clear to him that his final and absolute revenge was to be achieved by his dead body, torn and gluttering, upon the field […]. And it was his idea, vaguely formulated, that his corpse would be for those eyes a great and salt reproach.”

Next to Wilson, death is Henry’s constant companion throughout the novel. Like nature, its purpose as a motivation shifts as Henry’s mentality shifts. Earlier, death would serve Henry as an end to mental torment; now it stands as a rebuke to those who would have doubted him. Even toward the end of his character development, thoughts of individual rebuke and insult plague Henry’s mind.

“He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them.”

Henry will never again romanticize war. Neither will he trust to his own mind what can better be proven out by experience. This is not only the gospel of the military, but of American economic pragmatism in general.