Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 277selection and suggestion to saturation. He picks out carefully chosen details,
intimations of color and movement, apparently disconnected images and events. He
then places them in juxtaposition. The result is a fictional landscape remarkable for its
instability and uncertainty. Many of the scenes are set in a foggy, misty landscape, at
night or in the smoke of battle. And they offer a vivid visual equivalent for Crane’s
view of war and life. “None of them knew the color of the sky,” begins one of
Crane’s most famous short stories, “The Open Boat” (The Open Boat and Other Stories
(1898)). That is precisely the human fate, and the fate of the soldier: not to know “the
color,” the contours or the reality of the environment. Antiheroic, the novel also denies
real human agency. For “the youthful private” whose story this is – and whose name,
we eventually learn, is Henry Fleming – war is a disconcerting mix of boredom,
ignorance, and fear, where long periods of waiting and wondering are punctuated by
bursts of action that surprise and disconcert. War is, as Crane describes it, a paradigm
of life, not least because it is nasty, brutish, beyond personal control, and has death –
in the shape of the loathsome corpse Fleming comes across amid “a chapel” made of
“high arching boughs” – at its center. Characteristically, Crane draws an ironic contrast
between the romance and reality of battle, the heroic fate Fleming anticipates for
himself and the horrible futility, the fear and the feelings of cowardice he experiences.
But he also quietly propels his young protagonist toward a kind of revelation, founded
on an understanding of what his true place in war, and the scheme of things, is and
what that should mean for him, in terms of judgment and conduct.
During his first encounter with the enemy, Fleming witnesses a mass retreat of his
fellow soldiers. He also receives a head wound from the butt of a gun, when he grabs
a deserter to try to find out what is happening. This, and his flight from a second
encounter with the enemy, persuade him that he is no more than an insignificant
part of a “vast blue demonstration.” His dreams of glory fade into a sense of absurd-
ity, nihilism, and hopelessness. His comrades in arms may admire the “red badge of
courage” on his head, but he knows that it is not his courage, but his cowardice and
confusion, that has helped put it there. Fleming has swung from romanticism to
nihilism. Where Crane has him end, though, is with something like a proper human
response to the bleak realities of experience. Back with his regiment, after wandering
lost for some time, Fleming automatically, instinctively picks up the regimental
colors when they fall from the hands of another soldier during a charge forward
against the enemy. The description of this event manages a delicate balance between
a sense of the fated and the chosen. Fleming “was aware of the machinery of orders
that started the charge,” the reader is told; “the youth was pushed and jostled for a
moment before he understood the movement at all, but directly he lunged ahead
and began to run.” Equally, the account of the aftermath is poised between pride and
guilt, relief and regret. “He saw that he was good,” we learn, but in recalling “his
failure and his achievement,” and in particular his moments of cowardice and
betrayal, he finds something that “would become a good part of him” by “hindering
the workings of his egotism.” The muted moral conclusion that Crane and his young
protagonist arrive at is neatly imaged in a concluding description of “a golden ray of
sun” breaking for a moment “through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.” Fleming, theGGray_c03.indd 277ray_c 03 .indd 277 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM