The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

We tend to view the past as unrelated to the present- people did those sorts of things then, but they'd never do that now. It is odd to think that the neat, established facts of the past were once someone's messy, uncertain future. Henry Fleming reflects on this before he first sees combat: "There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever." The Civil War, however, is looming over his, and soon the immediacy of battle comes crashing down upon him.

A young Yankee farm boy, Henry alternates between honest introspection and self-approbating denial. Crane presents him with unflinching authenticity, exhibiting his naïve bravado, his cowardly self-justification, his struggles with life, death, and why. Marching towards battle, Henry encounters his first casualty. “He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare, the impulse of the living to try and read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.”

Henry flees like a threatened animal when he faces the enemy. He recognizes his cowardice but reasons it away, attributing it to a natural sense of self-preservation and excusing it by his later semi-heroics. Crane allows Henry some latitude, giving him moments of unimpeachable profundity, but he nevertheless maintains an ironic distance from him, subtly mocking his pride, which even Confederate bullets glance off harmlessly.

Henry comes face to face with the senselessness of war, but his initial thoughts when the battle is over banish any recollection of it. “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks- an existence of soft and eternal peace.”

Henry’s primary impulse is to escape the struggle and strife of the battlefield conflict. Ironically, though, the seeds of such vying lie planted within him. Pride, Henry’s distinctive vice, is at the root of all schisms, and the pride Henry felt in finally presenting himself to the world as a worthy soldier is not so far removed from the pride in the South Robert E. Lee relied on to lead his troops in defying the North.

Crane’s pervasive irony makes uncertain to what extent Henry’s illusions of himself are false. He is a vain boy, to be sure, but he deserves credit for shoring up against his fear and carrying his country’s flag bravely. He wades mainly in the intellectual shallows, but he merits praise for venturing forth as far as he dares. Henry is as complex and blameless, or to blame, as any human. Where our own illusions begin and end are just as vague.