The Schoolhouse Symbol Analysis

On the surface, the schoolhouse—converted into a field hospital full of grey-faced wounded men—symbolizes the bleak reality of death in combat. But the fact that this sad place was once a school for children adds a dash of irony to the wounded lieutenant’s fear of it. By making the the lieutenant terrified of a schoolhouse, Crane makes him seem childlike and whiny, behaviors that add to the character’s overall sense of inexperience in combat.

Before the injured lieutenant even reaches the hospital, he encounters a happy group of off-duty soldiers “making coffee and buzzing with talk like a girls’ boarding school.” This initial comparison makes it clear that a school is a cheerful place. So when the lieutenant next arrives at the “old schoolhouse,” even though his fear of amputation is perfectly justified, it’s ironic that he should be so scared of the building itself. Once “meek” and shy, he now “wrathfully” refuses to enter, his face “flushed.” To him, “the door of the old schoolhouse [looks] as sinister […] as the portals of death.” Crane repeats the adjective “old” to stress the familiarity and innocuousness of the place, further heightening the strangeness of the lieutenant’s terror.

Crane describes the lieutenant’s fear in terms of the building not to make fun of him but to suggest soldiers’ fundamental naiveté. Usually, the only other people so averse to school are children, so readers begin to associate the lieutenant’s behavior with that of a child. The surgeon on duty helps cement readers’ association when he tells the lieutenant not to “be a baby,” as a schoolyard bully might do. In this way, the symbol aids in the lieutenant’s greater character development, away from a position of military authority and toward embarrassing inexperience. By combining the story’s main symbol of mortality (a hospital) with the harmlessness of a schoolhouse, Crane makes the building not just a simple symbol for death in war but a more complex representation of humans’ response to it.