The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel written by American author Stephen Crane. The story follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the Union Army, who flees from the battlefield during the Civil War. Overwhelmed with a feeling of shame, he searches for a “red badge of courage,” like a wound during battle, to counteract his cowardly actions. When his regiment engages the enemy again, he becomes the standard-bearer and carries a flag.
In the first chapter of the novel, Crane illustrates Henry’s initial fear of participating in battle. It also establishes that the predicament he’s in is less a matter of war than of knowing himself and his own worth. Until that point in time, Henry had been a youth of comfortable assumptions. He believed that war was meant to create heroes. He also believed that men, when transformed into soldiers, are guaranteed a kind of honor that grants them social and historical prestige. The purpose of The Red Badge of Courage is not to convey a message such as the transformation from an average man to a brave soldier. Crane’s goal is to chart Henry’s psychological growth as he learns more about himself and tests out different types of behaviors, some of them courageous, some cowardly. The Red Badge of Courage challenges Henry’s most basic assumptions: the courage that he finally discovers crucially depends on rewriting his own laws of life in order to understand the world in an entirely new way and know his place in it.
I think the kind of virtue that Crane was trying to make in his book is that, fear can occur to any ordinary men, but it is important to face the fear directly and improve themselves, making them stronger.
There is no doubt that Crane uses fear as the catalyst for Henry’s transition from boyhood. Henry actually got exactly what he wanted. While initially he was a coward, this trial by fire did eventually give Henry more confidence, and therefore satisfaction. Henry wanted to experience war in order to gage the quality of his character, and that’s exactly what he got.
I agree that Henry got exactly what he wanted. When he left home for the army he was expecting to go on a life changing journey. This is exactly what Henry got in the battles he experienced although he was naive to its reality. Unaware of the violence that would occur, Henry was shocked in his first battle and fled in fear as a result.
I agree that this this book is more about Henry’s internal journey than the war itself. It is about him getting to know himself through his failures. He learns from his mistakes and is lucky enough to get a second change after fleeing. He eventually becomes not only a man, but a hero.