When I wrote about The Scarlet Letter I mentioned that is was part of a project I began (and then ended) to reread a number of the books I read in high school and have not read since. Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was the other book I read in the project. When I began reading it I was already wavering on the project and the book cemented my decision to not continue. I figure if I have not read a book since high school there was probably a good reason for that.
So, Red Badge of Courage. One of the few books I read in high school that I recall not liking at all. I hoped with time and maturity the reread would reveal the book to be amazing. Nope. While I can certainly appreciate it in a way I did not when I was 14, I still found it to be a very dull book.
First published in 1895, the book is a shining example of realism. Told from the limited third person perspective of Henry Fleming, a young man who joins up to fight in the American Civil War. His idea of what war is does not match the reality. Before he leaves, and even for a long time before he experiences battle he thinks,
It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greek like struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid.
When his regiment is finally sent out into the field they spend quite a lot of time walking and walking and walking, camping, walking some more as they are ordered to a new position, camping, waiting, waiting, waiting, only to have to move again. It is a tedious affair and the longer Henry has to wait for a battle the more he begins to worry that he will be a coward and turn and run. He becomes so obsessed by this worry that he starts asking his comrades probing questions in an attempt to find out what they think of the matter and succeeds only in annoying them.
When the battle finally comes, Henry does fine on the first assault but the enemy regroups and charges and breaks part of the line. Henry, seeing some of his comrades falling back in retreat, panics and turns tail and runs as fast and far away as he can.
He spends quite a long time wandering and berating himself for running while also trying to justify his actions. Eventually he falls in with wounded soldiers who are moving away from the lines because they can no longer fight. Among them is his friend Jim Conklin who was badly wounded, delirious, and eventually dies. During this time Henry is repeatedly asked where his wound is but avoids answering the question.
He does eventually get a wound but it doesn’t come from battle. He is whacked in the head with the butt of a riffle when he gets mixed up in a column of retreating soldiers. When he makes it back to his own regiment they all think he has been grazed in the head by a bullet and treat him kindly. Henry does not tell them the truth.
All this takes up a large portion of the book and I was beginning to think that perhaps this was an anti-war novel since the horrors are so brutally graphic and revelatory in just how much the lives of men like Henry are mere fodder.
But then the final part of the book is battle after battle and Henry, in an attempt to atone for his previous cowardice and desertion, fights valiantly and even becomes standard bearer when the previous one falls, leading his regiment to victory. During this time Henry acts almost entirely on fear, adrenaline and rage. He needs to prove himself and prove that he and his comrades are not useless and good for nothing like he overheard some officers saying they were.
And suddenly the book does not seem so anti-war any longer. It is blood and courage and glory. Henry survives the battle. His regiment regroups and gets new marching orders. As they march off, Henry thinks:
He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.
And it rains. And they trudge through mud. And the book ends:
Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks–an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
What the heck are we supposed to make of that? Is Henry just as delusional now as he was before he went to join the army? Does he think the tranquility is going to be real? Or has he faced death and, knowing there are more battles ahead and he is likely to die, looking forward to a heavenly reward? I apparently am not the only one to wonder as the interwebs tell me scholars have been debating the ambiguous ending for a very long time. Well and so.
The thing I remember most from high school about this book was my teacher going on and on about Christ figures. I had misremembered it as being Henry and while reading I was so confused because I just could not see it. Turns out, the Christ figure is supposedly Henry’s friend Jim Conklin, the one he finds wounded and delirious. I am almost 100% certain that when I read that, I made the same face I did in high school when my teacher said as much.
The difference between then and now (ok there are a lot of differences, but don’t quibble with me on this) is that then there was only Cliff’s Notes and now there is the all-knowing Google. I don’t recall Cliff as being especially helpful in this case. Google, however, tells me this whole Christ figure thing is hotly disputed because no one seems to know what the book means and so a group of scholars decided it was an allegory even though the evidence for this is thin. I don’t remember if Cliff says anything about this or not, but since my entire class realized early on in the first semester that the teacher was cribbing almost everything from Cliff, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
It also goes a long way in explaining why I was so garsh durned baffled about this idea and how it set me up for repeated “Christ figure” traumas throughout my freshman, and most of my high school, English classes. When mixed with the basic narrative conflicts drilled into my head (man against nature, man against society, man against man, man against self) it made for a pretty murky five-paragraph essay soup. How I survived high school English and majored in English literature at University is a mystery I will never be able to solve. My only guess is that I loved reading and books so much before I got to high school that there was nothing they could do ruin it for me. And thank heavens for that!
The older I get, the more I hate reading about symbolism or–God forbid–allegory. If you can’t read something literally and have it make sense, then is the time to go looking for other ways to read it, not before.
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Jeanne, it does get rather tedious when people try to impose things on a text unnecessarily, why does it have to be more complicated? As though that somehow makes it better or more worthy of admiration. So I agree with you completely!
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Yeah, forget the symbolism. Who needs it. At least this sort of top-down, outside-in symbolism. Henry’s wound has symbolic meaning to Henry. Why should I add something on top of that?
The Scarlet Letter is actually about symbolism. Characters within the story worry about what comets mean and force each other to wear symbols. But even then no reader needs to pile on more supposed symbols.
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Tom, exactly! Why try to make more of Henry’s wound than he does? Is that not enough? I agree, a symbolism seeking missile would score a direct h it on Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is very obvious about making sure we know about the symbolism and what it means. Crane on the other hand was working towards such a form of realism that all his toing and froing and waiting and waiting comes close to inducing a similar stupor in the reader that it does to the troops in the book. Perhaps scholars find that frustrating and so are inclined to try and make something out of nothing.
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Hawthorne’s characters are obvious about etc. Except that they disagree about what the symbols mean.
Humans worrying about symbols – what is that if not realism?
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Tom, You could say that ultimately it is Hawthorne since he wrote the characters, but you are right, in the context of the book it is the characters 🙂
Heh, symbols, who worries about symbols? 😉
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Any statement like “X symbolizes Y” should draw the question: “To whom?”
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Great commentary.
Somehow I never read this. It was not part of my High School curriculum.
I am fine with finding symbolism in works like this if I am convinced that the author really meant to include it. As you allude to here, some folks seem to really stretch and look for things that are not there.
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Brian, thanks! I say you did not miss anything by not reading this in high school! I have no problem with symbolism either especially when well done. But yeah, looking for something that is not there, not useful at all.
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Crane’s book is perhaps easier to admire than to enjoy. The symbolism/allegory you mention does seem a bit tacked on. If anything the book seems more of an example of hyperrealism. It is ages since I read it but the confused and ambiguous response of Henry Fleming does seem a believable reaction and there may well be irony in Crane’s portrayal of his reconciliation to battle. Onthe whole it does look like a book that would plague the high school student even more than The Scarlet Letter!
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Ian, you summed that up nicely: easier to admire than enjoy! 🙂 Had not considered irony regarding ending but yes, possible especially given Henry’s initial Greek-style glories of war belief, he gets a different kind of glory that is much less rational and much more mindless and animal. Definitely more of a plague than the Scarlet Letter!
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This was one of my ‘O’ level books so I would have read it when I was fifteen or sixteen. I remember absolutely nothing about it and even reading your review doesn’t bring back any memories of it at all. From that you will gather that my view of the novel coincides almost perfectly with yours.
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Alex, heh, that you remember nothing about the book speaks volumes. Not that the book isn’t well written, but one wonders why it gets the attention it does when perhaps a different book could fill the niche of an example of realism and/or war.
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I never read this one, either. It’s one of my sister’s favorites though, and a classic so I always felt like I should read it. I gave it a try once or twice and never got further than twenty pages or so. I still feel like I ought to give it one more attempt, but that’s it.
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Jeane, I have never known anyone to claim this as a favorite. Do you know why your sister likes it so much? I am curious 🙂
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Yes, another reader who has always meant to read this but never got around to it. Actually that is not entirely true–I did start it but it didn’t quite grab me from the first so it went quietly back to the shelf. Maybe, someday. Maybe. Symbolism can make reading tough going sometimes in novels–should you just sit back and enjoy or try and puzzle it all out? Depends on how much work and/or enjoyment you want.
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Danielle, there isn’t really much to grab one in this book if you ask me and if you never get around to reading it I won’t say you are really missing out 🙂 As an adult I don’t worry so much over symbolism but in high school it seems we were beaten with it and half the time I was left baffled. I think a lot of one’s understanding of symbolism has to do with life and experience.
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I read this book in a college English course after I had served in Vietnam. My first thought was Henry was, is and always will be a deserter and liar who left his comrades to die. He should have been shot for desertion. The fact he was not found out does not diminish what he did regardless of his later actions. You depend on your comrades in time of combat Without everyone helping each other, survival may not happen and many times even with everyone fighting you may not survive.
During this course no one ever mentioned a Christ figure being in this story.
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Richard, thanks for sharing your really interesting perspective! Henry seems to think he made up for his desertion but you have to wonder if his comrades ever found out the truth how they would feel about it. Probably they would feel very much like you do!
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This book keeps on appearing on ‘must read’ lists and I’ve always avoided it because the name really puts me off … thank you for a more detail review (though I’m still not very keen on reading it)!
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Shoshi, one should never feel obligated to read a book, classic or not. It is a good example of a kind of writing in American literary history but as a story, not all that good. So if you never read, don’t feel guilty!
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Not really. She also really liked a book about a man with PTSD- I could not make head or tails of even the first chapter of that book… (can’t recall the title now).
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It will remain a mystery then. 🙂
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I never read this for a class, but I did read it for an academic team I was on in high school. It was one of the few books I read for school that I really hated. So boring! I had to reread two of the books I initially loathed (Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness) in college and I liked them much more, so I’ve often thought about revisiting this. But when I think about it, I just get tired. You’ve confirmed my instinct that there’s no point.
The Stranger, on the other hand, is one I still think I ought to try again.
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Teresa, yes, so very boring! I don;t know why this book is inflicted on high school students. Some books we read when young do benefit from rereading but this one, not so much! Oh, The Stranger is a good one 🙂
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I fortunately never had to read this for high school, and I frankly never intend to. SORRY Stephen Crane. I like that one poem he has. About the universe not caring about you. And I feel that sets me free of any obligation to like or care about anything else he’s written. :p
(I don’t care about American history either, so.)
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Jenny, you lucked out! And you can confidently go through life knowing you really haven’t missed anything at all by not reading it 🙂
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