The Red Badge of Courage

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1895

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-24

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Dancing Flag

The flag serves the same function within the narrative of Crane’s novel as it serves on the battlefield: It is a symbol that the side one fights for has not been lost. Its bright and easily identified colors stand out from the murk and confusion of the battlefield, and while the person who wields it is vulnerable to death and interchangeable as a unit of battle, the flag itself is unreducible in this way. In the hottest moment of battle, Henry finds within himself “a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him […] Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power” (84).

As on a battlefield, the flag stands out brightly from the narrative. When Henry is at his most alienated from the war, the flag appears far away. When Henry is at his most dedicated, his nearness to the flag becomes a lifeline, so much so that Henry achieves his highest ascent to bravery and selfhood by taking up the role of color guardsman himself, hoisting the flag amidst the gunfire.

The Nameless Soldier

Crane lingers on descriptions of objects and landscapes with a painter’s eye, carefully illuminating the time of day and the setting with sensual detail. He also describes a gamut of emotional states with unusual precision. Such precision does not, however, apply to names, dates, and locations. We never learn the name of the conflict, country, flag, or ideology of the battle Crane describes; only context from outside the book would give you that information. He does not identify the weapons of the war with any accuracy, though the newness of those weapons defined the experience of the American Civil War. If Henry believes fervently in the Northern cause, he does not betray that belief. Crane makes a conscious effort to describe a universal experience of war, applicable in emotional tenor to almost any time and place in human history.

In this way, Crane never names the characters he describes. Such details are immaterial to his purpose. When names are used, they are used by the characters themselves, and only in context. We do not learn Henry Fleming’s name for many chapters into the book, though we have been inside of his head the whole time. This lack of specificity universalizes his tale.

Naturalism and the Pathetic Fallacy

As a literary technique, naturalism takes an unsparing look at reality, describing natural phenomena without regard for received human preconception. Naturalism has been such a normalized part of the literary toolbox for so long that it is difficult to recount how strange and experimental it seemed when it first appeared in the late 19th century. In the hands of its early proponents such as European writers Emile Zola or Henrik Ibsen, the pseudo-scientific attention to the real passage of time, or descriptions of every wart and bump found on a human face, tested the patience of late-Victorian readers, who were more accustomed to moral lessons in their fiction.

In Crane’s Americanized version, naturalism stands for veracity, a sort of you-are-there realism that convinces the viewer that Crane is an authentic spokesperson for the experience even though he was born six years after the war’s conclusion. While it was the inclination of many of Crane’s contemporaries not to sentimentalize depictions of nature, evoking the so-called “pathetic fallacy” of Romantic literature, which sought to link natural phenomena to the quirks of human emotion, Crane Romanticizes his landscape freely. When Henry’s mind and vision are clear, the landscape opens to him as a free expanse, and when his mind is clouded, the landscape closes on him, blinding him. In this way, writers such as Crane helped popularize what had up until then been regarded as a morbid avant-garde tendency, mingling hard truths with preconceived wishes.