The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage begins with a wide lens and with a survey of a regiment on the eve of battle. It provides an omniscient view of the world and the rumors that surround it, with “tall soldiers” and “loud soldiers” arguing within a throng of undifferentiated bodies. In this atmosphere, the “young soldier” begins the novel barely distinguished from his peers. As the narrator tells us, “He was an unknown quantity” (9). Soon, however, we take up residence in Henry’s head, and we will see the war through his eyes for the remainder of the book.

Henry’s name does not come up for several chapters; Crane refers to him as “the youth” for most of the novel. He is a private, of no distinguished rank. We learn about his adolescence on a farm, his mother’s foreboding, and his civilian pretentions toward war, but none of these aspects distinguish Henry in a world where most people grow up on farms, and where every soldier’s mother worries after her son’s safety. Our access to his mind, then, instead of any other, seems chosen by the novelist completely at random. We are encouraged to think that any lowly soldier may be having similar thoughts of bathetic grandiloquence mixed with lowly cowardice.