The Red Badge of Courage started very poorly and got a little better over time, but not much. When I write reviews, especially less-than-favorable ones, my tendency is to qualify everything with statements such as “my opinion” and “I think.” Now, surely that’s obvious, that this is my opinion and what I think and I have no business pretending to critically review the great American literature, so I will dispense with such phrases for the rest of the review. Feel free to add “Elaine ignorantly believes” to the beginning of any of the following sentences to improve your reading experience.
This book’s biggest problem is the lack of respect its author, Stephen Crane, has for it. The main character is a youth named Henry, although you might not know that from reading the first few chapters of the book, wherein he is consistently referred to as “the youth” (in my estimation, a sign of disrespect). It’s told by a third-person narrator, but we spend almost all of our time in Henry’s head, listening to poor Henry’s inner turmoil as he struggles with self doubt. He spends the first third of the book worrying if he’s going to run away from battle. He does run, and then he spends the next third of the book alternately hating himself for being a coward and trying to justify himself and hoping to be vindicated by a Union loss. The story finally picks up a bit when “the loud soldier” comes into the story. This man also has a name, which is also infrequently used, so I’ll share it in case you missed it: Wilson.
In Wilson, we finally get some interpersonal interaction and a likeable character, although Crane continues to tell us of all the reasons and ways in which Wilson has become a better person rather than allowing us to see this through Wilson’s character development. Perhaps this is why, although the entirety of the book happens in the space of a week or so and is almost entirely consumed in the commission of one battle and is a skinny little book, it still feels rather long. It’s because Stephen Crane tells us everything he wants us to know about his characters rather than telling us their names at the beginning of the book—or the first appearance—and allowing us to follow these characters through battle.
In the final third third of the book, Henry turns into a wild war machine of a soldier and fights like a cornered mule deer. I don’t know what sort of moral redemption we’re supposed to get from this, though, as Henry’s actions are thoughtless when not selfish. He doesn’t come clean about his earlier flight, he doesn’t deal with his comrades generously, and he stews on his believed maltreatment by his superiors and uses this hate to fuel his fighting. That’s what I’m getting at when I say Crane doesn’t respect his characters—they can be flawed and human without being complete moral degenerates.
With his characters in the midst of fighting for their lives and their country, Crane even makes a mockery of his title, The Red Badge of Courage, but putting it into Henry’s mind in the depths of Henry’s moral failings, after his flee from the frontlines, when he wished for an injury or a defeat to justify his flight from the fighting. This title is never redeemed at the end of the book, so it creates a question about whether Crane even sees courage as a good thing, or perhaps whether ferocity in war is courage. The “courage” Henry displays throughout the final third of the book, which garners recognition from his superiors and makes him proud, is manic and unthinking.
When I was in college, thinking I was thinking great thoughts, I had a ridiculous idea to write a book from the inside of a person’s head; nothing would happen, save the mundane, but the book would follow all of the interesting, funny, and clever thoughts of that person. Somehow, The Red Badge of Courage seems like a similar failed experiment, although in this book, everything happens! A battle has to be one of the most action-packed settings you could possibly place your character into, and yet…