The Red Badge of Courage: Symbols

Symbols are shown in red text whenever they appear in the Plot Summary and Summary and Analysis sections of this LitChart.

Corpses

Henry is fascinated with corpses in his search for answers about courage, glory, and self-sacrifice. He had initially believed that a glorious death would give him everlasting fame. But in the war, he sees corpses landing in awkward positions and looking betrayed. In doing so, they show the grotesque reality of war and reveal death as meaningless. In particular, the dead soldier in the “chapel” in the forest does not seem glorious to Henry—it’s just a mound of rotting meat. Its pointless death defies any effort to find meaning in death itself.

Wounds

For Henry, wounds are a “red badge of courage” to show off like a Purple Heart medal—the modern military award given to soldiers wounded in combat. Henry wants a wound to prove that he fought bravely and sacrificed himself. But wounds in Red Badge are not that simple. They reveal the flip side of Henry’s romantic ideas: the grim reality of war wounds. For example, after he’s wounded, Jim looks like his whole side had been “chewed by wolves.” Wounds reveal the ironies of war, too: when Henry gets his own wound, it comes when a fellow Union soldier strikes him with a rifle butt to get Henry out of his way. Henry then must lie to his regiment about the wound’s origin. Wounds also don’t have to be physical. The tattered man reflects Henry’s internal wounds—his guilt for running away and abandoning people.

The Tattered Man

A living symbol, the tattered man represents Henry’s own conscience projected onto someone else. The tattered soldier embodies Henry’s feelings of guilt and shame for fleeing battle. He also exposes Henry’s juvenile ways of dealing with his conflicted feelings: when the tattered man needs help, Henry abandons him, just as he wishes to abandon his own guilt.

Flags

By definition, flags are symbols of something else, such as a state or country. In Red Badge, battle flags symbolize the opposing armies. More importantly, they represent a soldier’s need to believe in his army and in the war itself. The flag transcends individual concerns and represents the soldiers as a collective force. The political symbolism of Civil War flags is mostly absent from Red Badge. Instead, they are compared to beautiful colorful birds. Flags in Red Badge are symbols about symbols, about the abstract causes for which soldiers put their lives on the line. When he takes over as flag-bearer, Henry is safeguarding all of the symbols that hold his world together.