310 Crane, Stephen
and joins another stream of fleeing men, he is hit
on the head by a fellow soldier’s rifle. He stumbles
on, struggling to deal with his cowardice, and a
“cheery soldier” leads him back to his regiment.
There his friend, the “loud soldier,” ministers to
him, thinking that Henry has been shot in battle
and admiring his bloody wound as a badge of cour-
age: “Yer a good un, Henry. Most’ a men would a’
been in th’ hospital long ago. A shot in th’ head ain’t
foolin’ business.”
Henry, of course, knows that he is not a hero,
but he does not reveal how he actually received
the wound. As he is lauded, he soon begins to feel
capable of great valor, though his conscience is both-
ered by the memory of the tattered soldier who had
helped both him and the dying tall soldier.
Later, Henry and his friend overhear the general
and another officer plan to send the 304th, their reg-
iment, into a battle they feel is not winnable: “They
fight like a lot ’a mule-drivers. I can spare them best
of any.” Resenting this lack of confidence in their
ability, the two young men fight valiantly, seizing
the regimental flag from a dead soldier and keeping
it high to spur the group on in battle. When they
hear the colonel and the lieutenant complimenting
them, the two youths are jubilant, forgetting all the
previous pain and disillusionment.
The book ends on that note, and the question
of heroism is never solved. Was Henry a hero in the
last battle? Was he a coward for running earlier?
Is the position of hero dependent on what others
think?
Henry feels that “at last he was enabled to more
closely comprehend himself and circumstance,” but
he does not acknowledge that even greater threats
may loom. The implication is that Henry has grown
through these few days of battle; the irony is that
he has been tried only briefly and that he still does
not know what he will do in the next battle. He has
fought valiantly to prove that he is not expendable,
but he will undoubtedly face even more dangerous
situations later. His thoughts of heroism are still
punctuated by shameful feelings about deceiving the
tattered man, one who did what is right, much as
Henry’s mother had advised him to do.
Joyce Smith
reliGiOn in The Red Badge of Courage
Although there is no overt religion in The Red Badge
of Courage, critics have debated Stephen Crane’s
use of religious imagery in the novel. The son of
a Methodist minister and a mother who worked
vigorously for the church and the temperance move-
ment, Crane rebelled against the rules and regula-
tions that his parents advocated. He was, however,
quite familiar with the Bible and he often used reli-
gious allusions in his writing. In this novel, he not
only includes such references, he also incorporates
other images that have been construed to refer to
religion or religious rites.
Soon after Henry has fled from his second battle,
he tries to justify his action by equating it with the
laws of nature. He looks to the landscape for assur-
ance, and he finds a “fair field holding life.” That
field represents for him the opposite of what he has
witnessed in battle: “It was the religion of peace.” He
tests his theory of nature by throwing a pine cone
at a squirrel, which runs from such assault much
as Henry and the other men had run from battle.
Henry seems to feel a moral, perhaps religious, jus-
tification for his retreat from battle, supported by the
laws of nature itself.
Leaving this peaceful field, Henry soon encoun-
ters what appears to be a natural chapel, formed by
arching boughs of the trees and having “a religious
half light.” As he contemplates nature’s tranquility,
his peace turns to horror on encountering a soldier’s
corpse propped against a tree. The corpse’s star-
ing eyes and open mouth are accompanied by ants
moving along its upper lip. What began as religious
peace, or the peace of nature, becomes just the oppo-
site for the young recruit.
The most controversial of the images that may
or may not be religious is that of the sun in the last
sentence of chapter 9: “The red sun was pasted in
the sky like a wafer.” Some critics have equated this
wafer with a communion wafer, symbolically covered
with the red of communion wine and representing
the body and blood of Christ’s sacrifice. These same
critics point out that Jim Conklin has sacrificed
himself in battle, that his initials echo those of Jesus
Christ, and that his moral stance has been superior
to that of Henry, who has succumbed to cowardice