Comment

The Red Badge of Courage

An Episode of the American Civil War
Oct 17, 2019wyenotgo rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
One of the first novels (at least among those written in English) to disrupt the prevailing standard of portraying warfare as glorious and exhilarating. Tellingly, Crane characterizes a pitched battle as a machine whose purpose is to produce corpses. The taking of ground, despite being the momentary goal in the heat of battle, is revealed to be meaningless. At no point is there any mention of the overall objective of the entire endeavor. Crane further flew in the face of tradition by portraying the officer corps, especially the generals, as incompetent, capricious and oblivious to the suffering of their troops. Crane's ploy of rarely using soldiers' names is effective in pointing out the fact that they are simply pawns in a deadly game played by others. And yet he makes it painfully clear that these are real, breathing, frightened, confused, angry, resentful young men who desperately seek to avoid acknowledging themselves as victims. By reckless acts in the face of heavy fire they seek to rise above their powerless state and claim for themselves moments of personal victory, if only in their own eyes. The vitality of these young men is further enhanced by Crane's language, especially the pithy, abrupt, earthy dialogue, while the inner turmoil experienced by scantily trained, poorly led farm boys is mercilessly exposed. Although his protagonist, Henry Fleming craves a "red badge" signifying courage in the form of a visible wound, he comes to understand that it's coming to terms with his own shame, fear and moral conflict that requires even greater courage than facing imminent death on the battlefield. Although Crane, by his own admission took much of his inspiration from Tolstoy and set his novel in mid 19th century, this is a book that looked far into the future and marked a profound change in the way war was to be portrayed in literature — by writers such as Remarque, Hemingway and others.