The Red Badge of Courage

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1895

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Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-24

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Themes

The Reality of War Versus the Myth

It was a predilection of the narrative arts in the 19th century to make war seem heroic and blustery, full of soldiers of super-human bravery, led by steely, intelligent commanders who take warfare to a pinnacle of chess-like perfection. This predilection never went away; it continues to be the chief concern of many video games and novels in our own time. As in the 19th century, such tales flatter and mythologize powerful interests and even raise army recruitment levels.

In Stephen Crane’s day, the Civil War was a generational memory, fought by men 35 years in the past. The American Civil War was especially bloody. It tore at an existential fabric in the reality of the United States, one that is still felt in the 21st century. At the same time, the American Civil War featured the trial run for new and terrible forms of mass extermination technology that would play a role in the conflicts of the 20th century; it was during this war, for instance, that repeating rifles were introduced, increasing killing efficiency over muzzle-loading rifles. To add to the horror, much of the military elite stuck to 18th-century Napoleonic-era massed formation techniques that caused unprecedented casualties. Consequently, America was war-shy afterward and kept its post-Civil War ambitions of violent conquest strictly westward-leading, where continued advances in war machinery resulted in the genocide of native inhabitants of the land but relative safety for the small bands of well-equipped solders sent out to do the killing. It was a time interpreted by elites, and by the middle class, as peaceful.

It is common for people who have experience with war to be triggered by seeing it reenacted in peacetime; The Red Badge of Courage was not written for those who had experienced the trauma of war close at hand. Crane’s novel is written instead for an America searching for meaning after three decades of peace, one whose government was on the verge of ramping up its military adventurism overseas. His audience wanted to understand war and to be told that its consequences were worthwhile. Thus, it features a cold-blooded, naturalistic description of war and death that could only be tolerated by people who had not seen it up close, who could view the blood and violence of war only through a sophisticated and virgin mindset, a mindset that wanted, above all, a rich and realist aesthetic experience. Crane’s novel informed such people that war was a refreshing antidote to the poison of confusing peacetime politics and psychology.

The reality of war is that the trauma it produces destroys the minds of those who engineer and fight in it, just as readily as it destroys the bodies of millions swept within its jaws. The novel fantasy of Crane’s book, by contrast, is that it proposes just the opposite; in The Red Badge of Courage, minds that witness human bodies torn apart by artillery come out of the experience with rebuilt psychological frameworks that are spotless, clear, and proud.

Individual Versus Collective Responsibility

With the rise in the novel came an increasing sophistication in descriptions of the interior life of people’s minds. Interiority is inherent to the novel, and no other genre, save the social-scientific study of the brain itself, comes close to matching the novel in this arena. As an artform, then, the novel cultivates individuality and interprets emotion as a kind of garden in which the metaphorical flowers of, say, love and fidelity are matched against the weeds and vines of jealousy, cowardice, and hatred. More radically, the reader of the novel can begin to see an interest even in the weeds, carefully balancing what makes a character “interesting” over what makes them “good.” Such a reader can even begin seeing themselves as just such a cultivatable personality, mixing moral with immoral behavior with regard only toward what’s most interesting or colorful.

Such individualism is disastrous for the purposes of military service, in which discipline and order serve clear life-and-death functions within a rigid hierarchy. In the service of militarism, Crane takes the 19th-century fashion for descriptions of interiority and mental development and turns it on its head, making interiority a prison. Henry is tortured by his own thoughts. The key to breaking out of this prison, Crane says, is through duty to others.

This perspective is illustrated from the very start of the novel, when Henry compares his sense of courage to Jim Conklin and is told that, “if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s’pose I’d start and run […] but if everybody was a-standing and a-fighting, why, I’d stand and fight” (11). Courage is borrowed from a collective sense born out of common need and not from received knowledge, nor even from the command of authority. Alternately, courage diminishes as one wanders away from the pack. Alone, hungry, and afraid, Henry withers to practically nothing as he admonishes himself for running away, with only himself as company to witness the trauma around him.

The Novel as a Form of Journalism

The novel began its life as a poor step-sibling to the prestige of poetry and the popular appeal of playwriting. The existential problem at the heart of the novel was simply to ask itself (as many 17th- and 18th-century novels did, in prefaced apologies): Why spend thousands and thousands of words describing an entirely invented story? The answer, for novelists of the era, was to frame the novel within a strictly delineated moral lesson, framing the lie of the narrative with an essential truth. Throughout the 19th century, this process became more sophisticated, disguising moral lessons within the ambiguity of politics and character.

During the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, a profound transformation—in fact, several profound transformations—took place regarding the role of literary arts to society. The novel took pains to free itself from moralism, bringing existential questions about its reason for being back to the forefront and reveling in them, sometimes even promoting the idea that art should be done for its own sake. Crane represents one of many forms of reaction to this sort of highly aestheticized modernism. Acknowledging these modern sensibilities, he replaces moral lessons with historical facts, and blind religiosity with the sort of political ideology most associated with the newspapers Crane wrote for in the late 19th century, but which has quietly permeated the business of newswriting ever since.

The mysterious stranger who guides Henry back into the fold is in some sense an embodiment of this journalistic role. This description of the mysterious stranger could be viewed as sinister if taken out of context: “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” (58). In context, the stranger does Henry a service, allowing him to collate his violent interior with soothing and unpretentious stories. Better still, the stranger takes the position of the “view from nowhere,” erasing all traces of his presence, just as a journalist purports to do. Thus, the novel is put back in its proper place, this time as a step-sibling to factual reporting rather than to the more esoteric arts. Such an attitude would prove very influential, informing the work of 20th-century writers such as Tom Wolfe and Normal Mailer, who saw themselves as reporters of reality as much as fabricators.