This book describes one young Union soldier's first experience with combat. It takes place over the course of two days on a nameless battlefield in Virginia. When "The Red Badge of Courage" was published, thirty years after the war in which it's set, Stephen Crane was credited with writing one of the most accurate first person accounts of what combat in the Civil War was really like. Veterans swore they had been in that exact battle with him. Some even claimed to have seen him in the field and vouched for the accuracy of his accounts. Stephen Crane, however, was born in 1871, six years after the war had already ended.
That's how good this book is.
You have found that all of the things you complained about when you read this book in high school were things that you enjoyed now that you are an adult. The colloquial speech, the nameless soldiers, the inner monologue, and the protagonist's constantly changing emotions all added a realism that sucked you right in to the narrative.
On the eve of his first battle a young soldier, named Henry Fleming but most often called "the youth," is consumed with worry that he might turn and run in the face of his enemy. He is afraid that his childish ideas of himself as a glorious warrior might evaporate in the heat of actual warfare. He fears his own cowardice more than death, since he thinks it more likely. Asking his fellow soldiers if they too share this fear of their own moral weakness does not help since they all lie and deny any such fears.
His emotional self awareness is rare amongst protagonists of war novels. His honesty in his fear of failure is universally human, but tends to be too unattractive to make for a common literary theme. This emotional self awareness is a hallmark of "The Red Badge of Courage." Throughout the novel, Crane describes every fleeting emotion and every passing fear, only to have those fears reversed or those emotions negated within a few pages. Henry's mind constantly vacillates between contradictory thoughts, sureness and uncertainty, confidence and doubt, bombast and fear, alternating between claiming the spotlight and shrinking from stage. It's very human.
When battle finally finds him, Henry, the youth, finds himself swept up in the bloodlust and duty of it all. He instinctively joins his brothers in arms and automatically performs his role as a soldier in his nation's army, pouring rifle fire into the rank of a charging Rebel army. He is a part of a larger machine, one bent on defeating the enemy. He is powerful and integral to a greater plan. His enemies turn back from their charge. He has conquered his fear of cowardice.
The book is far more psychological than you remembered. Crane climbs into the minds of all soldiers who have ever fought: their fear of combat, their dread of failure, all combined with their instincts of a finely honed warrior. He vividly and succinctly details the immediacy of battle. The staccato speech of fighting men, the shock of the carnage, the odd moments that form flashbulb memories, the surprise rude realization that the world did not stop spinning simply because your own life was in danger, the feeling that your ten yards of perception constituted the entire war. Not bad for a man who had never seen war first hand.
Soon after his moment of triumph, Henry, the youth, does succumb to his worst fear. Following the lead of other men in his regiment in the face of another rebel charge, he turns tail and runs for his life. He wanders in the rear areas and comes across a column of walking wounded men, heading for a rear hospital area. He finds himself envying the wounded and longing for his own wound, his own red badge of courage. He watches a friend die horribly, crazed and alone in a nameless field, and Henry wishes now that he were dead instead of wounded.
Returning to the front, with men he does not know, Henry is caught up in a mass retreat. Lost in a tide of terrified and shamed men he reaches out to ask one what is happening. The other soldier, his brother in arms and shame, smashes Henry in the head with his rifle and gives the youth the wound he recently wished for. Henry stumbles off to find his regiment and is cared for by a friend who acts very differently than he did just that morning, more tender, more patient and understanding. Battle has changed him. War changes all who experience it.
The next day Henry takes part in several bloody clashes and distinguishes himself in the fighting, even taking up the regimental flag when the color sergeant is killed. He leads a charge, finds his courage, and realizes that terrible secret that makes all good soldiers worth a damn; in order to be an effective soldier, you have to understand that you are already dead, that it is only a matter of time so you might as well fight as hard and as honorably as you can before your number is up.
After the battle, however, he is haunted by his shortcomings. He is convinced that no acts of valor can make up for the sins he hides in his heart. He ran from his duty, he witnessed a friend die, he ran in shame from another wounded soldier who needed help but kept asking whether Henry was hurt. But, looking inward, Henry finds he can forgive himself. He too has been changed and is no longer the boy he was the day before. War has changed the youth into a man.
The brilliance of "The Red Badge of Courage" is it's ambivalence. You read it and heard a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of war to the hearts, minds, and bodies of those who fight. The desperation, the sorrow, the destruction are rarely worth the sacrifice. You saw no glory in the story, only dire warnings. But you also saw how someone else could read it, someone more inclined to embrace the virtue of armed conflict, and hear it as an impassioned endorsement of the glories of war. Valor and sacrifice can be very attractive. Crane does not tell you what to think; he writes the story as empathetically and realistically as he can, and leaves it to you to decide. Brilliant.
It is also remarkable that Crane had never set foot on a battlefield before writing this book. He says that he grew up listening to old veterans talking about what the war was like, soaking in every detail, imagining what it must have all been like. This is the magic of literature and also of the human mind. These gifts allow us to face things we may never face in real life, to examine fears we may never have to deal with, to understand things we would never otherwise be given the chance to understand. A great book can tap in to that miracle of human empathy, our ability to recognize the complexity of other people, and it can provide us a glimpse of the human condition through the eyes of others, even if those others never existed.
On to the next book!
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