Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895) – A young man yearns to join the fighting during the American Civil War, only to discover that the reality of the war and who he is are different than he imagined.

This book appears on the list of “Required Reading in School” for a lot of people for many years.  I remember reading it in junior high school.  The book had an impact right away.  I would have been reading it just as our involvement in Viet Nam was coming to an end.  The almost century-old story was just as hard-hitting as the evening news had been for the last decade.  Young Henry Fleming, simply called “the youth” for most of the book, wasn’t much older than I was at the time.  While I haven’t read the book between then and now, it has always stayed with me.

From a writer’s point of view, this book trashes the idea of “write what you know”.  Crane did not serve in the military and was born after the Civil War. Inspired by popular histories of the day, Crane creates an intense experience of combat for the naive hero of his story.  The battle in the book is believed to have been based on Chancellorsville, and Crane may have spoken to some veterans of a New York unit to flesh out the description.

Whatever the inspiration, the result is stunningly realistic.  Crane weaves the realism with what Crane called a “psychological portrayal of fear”.  The story has a richness beyond an historical telling of the battle and an edgy natural feel.

As a young man, I was stunned by the empathy that I felt for Fleming, caught in the chaos of war.  As an older man, I find myself shaking my head at his foolish romanticism.  He begins in the belief that he is missing out on a great adventure.  After his first failure of nerve, the youth continues to deceive himself that somehow he is better than most around him.  The thread of fear throughout, most often fear of what others might think, continues to drive him through to the end.

It’s interesting to pick up a book that has passed its centennial and find such a “modern” story waiting.  While not always popular with veterans of the war, probably because it portrays the soldiers as frail and sometimes delusional human beings, the novel sprung Crane to instant stardom.  He would never reach the same heights as an author.  It remains an American classic, and well worth the read.