In the next skirmish, he learns to use his anger at the enemy as a way to intensify his fighting ability, and in the one following, he incorporates his anger and his inarticulate love of the flag to join with his friend Wilson to save the colors and thereby encourage the other men. Finally receiving a wound from an angry comrade who hits him on the head, Henry returns to camp without disclosing the real source of the wound to his comrades, who once again treat him kindly, assuming his head has been grazed by a rifle ball. After learning that the troops have held out against the Confederates without him, watching Jim Conklin die, and receiving solicitous treatment from all those he encounters, however, Henry thinks less and less of himself. He joins a group of walking wounded and angrily turns from them when they ask him where he has been hurt. Having run away as a coward, Henry tries to justify his actions by blaming the officers and anyone he can think of but himself. In the heat of battle, the day continues blue and golden, as if it had nothing to do with the frantic and bloody deeds of war. Much of Crane’s irony, in fact, derives from nature’s passivity. Indeed, during the first skirmish, Henry does run in terror into the woods, only to learn that he cannot escape death even in the cathedrallike stillness: He encounters a grotesque sight in the form of a maggot-infested dead soldier. Crane uses names very sparingly to convey a sense of the universal situation of his characters thus Henry is usually referred to as “the youth,” his friends Jim Conklin, “the tall soldier,” and Wilson, “the loud one.” Henry agonizes over whether he will have the courage not to run when he engages in his first battle, but at first, fearful of exposing his naïveté, he asks only indirect questions of his fellow soldiers. As did many young men, Henry envisions himself the subject of purple-and-gold fantasies of heroism when he joins up with the 304th New York regiment. The novella opens as the youthful protagonist, Henry Fleming, lately volunteered and now bivouacked with the army, thinks back to his having left home despite his mother’s protests. On one level this tale is a bildungsroman that follows a young man from callow immaturity into a somewhat rueful maturity. As to Crane’s firsthand knowledge of war, he had none: Born in 1871, six years after the peace treaty signing at Appomattox, Crane simply had a first-rate talent for conveying the daily life of the soldier based on stories he had heard and his own fertile imagination. He describes cannon fire as giant red war blossoms the long lines of troops appear as dragonlike serpents winding their way through brooding hills. Nonetheless, Crane has a different view of reality that suggests its elusiveness and its ambiguity. The realistic subject, war, is certainly a typical one for many of the 19th-century realists-Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain, for instance, all of whom deal with such themes as slum life, alcoholism, and prostitution, along with war-and Crane handles the battle scenes with breathtaking intensity. Although celebrated both for the realism of its style and for the authenticity of its battle scenes, the work provides, strictly speaking, only limited examples of these qualities. The Red Badge of Courage, the Novella long considered Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War. Analysis of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
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