Somehow I managed to get all the way through high school and a bachelor’s degree in literature without having read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. But with this year being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, it seemed like an appropriate time to finally read it.
If you’re at all familiar with it, The Red Badge of Courage is a very short book–not even 150 pages. Any yet the main character, Henry Fleming, seems to hit the absolute highest and lowest points possible for a soldier of his day. It wasn’t what I’d expected, based on what I’d heard of Crane’s work. I’d understood him to be of the Realist school of writing, but this book seemed to be an early form of stream of consciousness. The reader spends the whole book not precisely in young Henry’s head, but we get to hear, see, and feel everything he does as well as get every single though that crosses his mind. After a brief introduction, we follow Henry to his first (unnamed) battles and the whole book takes place over just a few short days.
Summaries of this book are easy to come by, so I want to focus on what struck me most about the book. Believe it or not, what caught my attention was the language Crane used. First of all, Henry’s thoughts are described in elegant prose–that’s the best way that I can describe it. It’s not overdone, but it’s very poised and elegant. Even when Henry is in the thick of the fighting, I didn’t really get a sense of how dirty, terrifying, and loud that I know the battles must have been. Second, I think Crane must have really captured how Americans used to speak in the mid to late nineteenth century. It reminded me a lot of the dialogue of Twain’s books. There are consonants dropped all over the place and speeches are peppered with what sounds to me now as quaint expressions. I completely understand now why the writers of Deadwood updated the language, because we just can’t take the authentic language seriously.
A lot of the books I’ve read that feature soldiers and war use a kind of shorthand about the experience, particularly lines about waiting and moments of absolute terror. But Crane expanded on ideas like that. I know this book was written well after the war. Crane wasn’t even born until after the war. But in this book, it’s as if you–the reader–are plunked right down into the thick of it. We get to watch Henry muse about camp life, rumors, and marching. One thing that Crane captures particularly well, I think, is the sense of confusion. Henry is at the bottom of the military totem pole, and can’t give the reader any larger sense of what’s going on. Once the fighting starts, it’s particularly hard to keep track of what’s going on. Though I will say that Henry seems to have the luck of the devil. Apart from being smack in the middle of the Civil War, he’s pretty lucky considering what happened to the rest of his regiment.
Apart from the language and the history, I know other readers will agree that the important thing about this book is Henry’s struggle with his courage. I wouldn’t say that Henry is a coward. It’s more as though he lets his (justifiable) fear get the better of him. That part I completely believed. But I had a harder time believing Henry after he started charging into fights. I could believe it better if it was clearer that Henry was just trying to ward off accusations of cowardice. But he seemed to turn into a nineteenth century Rambo towards the end.
I am glad I read this book. It was new and original for the time. I don’t see similar attitudes about war in literature until the World War I poets like Owens and Sassoon were published. I see this book as good history. Reading impressively big histories about the Civil War won’t transport you to the time as much as this book tries to do. Unless you read contemporary letters from the time, The Red Badge of Courage is the closest you can get to being there (if only for a few hours’ reading time).