Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage appears, at least in part, to be a story about boyhood ambition and what might be considered a naïve personal search for courage – a search for recognition as a “hero” in other people’s eyes.  We have read about several heroes so far during this term – Mary Rowlandson, Natty Bumppo, Eliza Harris, and Uncle Tom, just to name a few.  Henry Fleming, however, is a different kind of hero; he is struggling, it seems to me, to find the hero in himself who matches his perception or understanding of what a hero is supposed to be.  Others we have read about were less self-conscious and were not striving to become heroes or even contemplating what it means to be a hero – rather they were simply trying to live an honest life (fulfill the Puritan dilemma: trying to be moral/good person in an immoral/evil world) and heroism came their way.

Strangely, for a novel that was widely praised by Civil War veterans as an extraordinarily realistic representation of what life was like (i.e., boredom, fear, terror, and gore) for the ordinary Civil War soldier, perhaps the novel also suggests something about the US thirty years after Appomattox.  It was world of commerce, industrialization, bureaucracy, with but a smidgen of heroes to compare to the warriors, North and South, of the Civil War.  Henry Fleming’s heroism was an ideal rather than a reality – perhaps something else for the Leatherstocking to find unacceptable about progress.

Denis Brennan