The Red Badge of Courage By Stephen Crane

 

The Red Badge of Courage

 

By Stephen Crane b. Nov. 1 1871 in Newark, New York.

 

Henry Fleming, the main character confronts his cowardice and gains a new, realistic sense of duty and responsibility, leaving behind a head filled with immature romantic dreams, false hero-images and heroic deeds he will perform. His confrontation with death on the battlefield during the American Civil War, defeats these romanticized notion of Heroism. The narrative is a ‘shocked encounter’ with himself, mankind and the universe. This narrative manifests the process by which Henry matures.

 

He learns that to be alive does not mean that a person is worthy, significant or important. He loses these common illusions of entitlement and self-importance. He confronts the base fact that each person exists alone and is disconnected in an uncaring universe. Crane confronted the “absurdity of ethical values and the isolation of man in an amoral, Godless universe.” Henry is forced to come face to face with his own projected false image of himself. Existentialism asserts that man must create the meaning of himself, of his own life.  He discovers that importance, significances and worth only comes from within. 

 

Early in the book there is the departure from home to seek maturity, despite the goodness and security of his Mother and their farm. The plot moves from the usual uncertainty and desperation to triumph. At first he runs away from life, but in the end, he runs towards it.

 

There are a number of contrasts between illusion and reality, between the realities of the war and the illusions in Henry’s mind. The book illustrates how people are forever fooling themselves. He shows how little of reality, human beings can bear.

 

 

 

In chapter 12 there is a kind of classic religious conversion, of “being born again”. –    

  “the flaming wings of lightning flashed before his vision. There was a deadening rumble of thunder within his head… He sank to writhing on the ground.” This transfiguration seems to be assisted by his brief encounter with a wise stranger that shows him compassion and friendship and helps leads him back to his company. The strong ‘handshake’ between the two of them, placed at the very center of the novel is the true pivotal point of both the novel and Fleming’s life. This is when his conversion takes place, when he travels back from the barren wilderness of nature and war to the warm community of men.

He has traveled, back to his psychological early childhood and then forward again, from a child’s view of the universe, centering on himself, to the mature understanding of adults that: the universe doesn’t care; only other human beings do. He finds his identity and thus attains his maturity.  He has had a catharsis of his inner shame, grief, anger and mistrust. He becomes ready to be re-educated.

 

The last sentence of the novel hints at the newborn man whom St. Paul became and wrote about. Through suffering, Fleming had come to terms with himself and is at “peace” with the formerly scared and ignorant Henry Flemming. After the novel the ‘youth’ becomes ‘a changed, man’

 

Many readers see this novel “The Red Badge’ as Henry’s journey into himself, like Thoreau’s seeking what the ancient Greeks sought: to know oneself, to unify one’s thinking, one’s emotions and behaviour.  He turns from amateurism to respectful professionalism. This is the journey of self-discovery.  It is a drama of moral redemption.

 

Henry matures through experience as did Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Paul Baumer in All Quite on the Western Front, and Maya Johnson in I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

 

Crane once commented that his novel offered ‘rules for the guidance of the dammed.’

 

The book summary was written by W. Howe– on October 30, 2003