The Red Badge of Courage: Themes

In LitCharts, each theme gets its own corresponding color, which you can use to track where the themes occur in the work. There are two ways to track themes:

• Refer to the color-coded bars next to each plot point throughout the Summary and Analysis sections.
• Use the ThemeTracker section to get a quick overview of where the themes appear throughout the entire work.

 Courage

Red Badge is a study of courage and fear, as seen in the shifting currents of Henry’s thoughts and actions during the battle. Henry begins the story with youthful romanticized ideas about courage from the classical tradition: in particular, the heroic ideals found in the ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad by Homer. In the Iliad, warriors mingle with gods, die gloriously, and enjoy everlasting fame. But the tremendous violence of the Civil War unsettled these notions of courage and glory. The soldiers in Red Badge, especially Henry and Wilson, begin to doubt their naïve versions of courage when faced with battle. Instead, they discover a grittier and more complicated form of courage. And they only discover it after the fact: during Henry’s most courageous moments in battle, he is hardly aware of anything except heat, noise, anger, and the mechanical repetition of firing. Even when courage is present, it’s not really there. So what is courage?

Courage takes many forms in the novel, none of which are stable. Wanting to find a lasting form of courage, Henry hopes for a wound or “red badge of courage” to wear. Taking it to the extreme, Henry daydreams about a glorious death. But is courage self-destructive? Is it a performance for others, or for yourself? Does it happen when we’re not thinking about it? Henry seeks answers from himself and from the soldiers around him, including corpses and the wounded. Though the story may provide no clear answers, it offers several perspectives: Jim Conklin, Wilson, and the lieutenant each offer different versions of courage to compare with Henry’s. Perhaps there is courage in Jim’s willingness to see things pragmatically, or in Wilson’s acceptance of his limitations, or even in Henry’s deep self-questioning. In the end, the reader must decide about courage—who has it, and even whether it’s good or bad.

 The War Machine

Red Badge uses the language of machines, labor, and industry to describe war. In contrast, Henry dreams about a classical idealized kind of war. But that kind of romanticized war, emphasizing heroic action, is a thing of the fictional past: it has no relation to an industrial war such as the Civil War, in which individual soldiers become cogs in a much larger machine. As Red Badge reveals, the war machine is designed to move massive armies and churn out corpses. (Machine guns were used for the first time in the Civil War.) Machines are unsympathetic, unthinking, and impersonal, and the war machine makes Henry’s hopes for personal glory seem pathetic, even tragic. Crane also uses the theme of a mechanized war to make a grim comment on the industrialism of the late 19th century and its dehumanizing effect on laborers.

 Youth and Manhood

All the men in the 304th regiment are inexperienced in battle, and many—like Henry and Wilson—are very young. The narrative consistently refers to Henry as “the youth,” emphasizing his naïveté. Though Red Badge is mostly about finding courage, it is also largely about Henry’s quest to become a man. Because of his romantic view of war, Henry initially thinks he’ll achieve manhood through fighting. And for him, and many other soldiers, manhood seems to hang in the balance of each battle: they feel weak when the enemy has them trapped, and manly when they fight and win. By the end of the novel, after facing the realities of war, Henry is only a few days older and still has some juvenile characteristics, but he feels like a man. Has he matured? Perhaps: Henry finally dreams of tranquility and peace rather than war. He discards his boastfulness for a quiet more mature sense of self-determination.

 Noise and Silence

From popping musketry to the belching of artillery explosions to the “devotional silence” of the woods, Red Badge gets much of its descriptive power from its descriptions of sound. The noises of battle give the reader a soldier’s point of view and do more than just describe war: they convey the intensely disorienting experience that battle must have been for soldiers on the ground. For a low-ranking infantryman like Henry, noise is his only news of the battle. The narrative describes explosions as the armies communicating with each other. All this noise overwhelms Henry and he can’t understand what’s going on: a metaphor for the chaos and senselessness of war. On the other hand, silence is golden. When “the loud young soldier” Wilson matures from his empty boastfulness, he quiets down. The story ends with Henry yearning for “soft and eternal peace”—the end of noise and war altogether.

 Nature

Henry has a keen eye for his surroundings, and descriptions of landscapes get a great deal of attention in the narrative. Descriptions of scenery emphasize the stark difference between nature and the war machine. Battles look strangely inappropriate being fought on sunny fields. When the smoke clears, the sky is just as blue and beautiful as before. Nature exists separately from the war, going “tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.” At first it seems as if this separateness makes nature a tranquil refuge from the war. But as the novel progresses, Henry realizes that nature is merely indifferent to human concerns. This is shockingly apparent when Henry sees ants feeding on the face of a dead soldier. This unsympathetic view of nature, common to Naturalism, the literary movement that Crane pioneered, comes from the late-19th-century fascination with Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the fight for survival in a hostile world.

 The Living and the Dead

Henry is fascinated by the spectacle of death. He looks into the eyes of corpses for answers to his questions about death, but they fail to communicate anything but strangeness, emptiness, and horror. When Henry and Wilson each get a flag to carry for the regiment, a position of honor, each time they must wrestle it from the hands of a dying man. Without providing any definitive answers, Red Badge explores a host of questions regarding death in general and death in war in particular: Do our beliefs endure beyond the grave? Is fighting and dying worth it? Can death be glorious? Can we ultimately know anything about what happens after death?