The Red Badge of Courage is an appallingly realistic depiction of war. It follows a young man named Henry Fleming, a soldier of the American Civil War. He hears of war from afar, picturing glory, honor, accolades from his peers, and swooning young women. What he finds bears almost no resemblance to his dreams and expectations.
The story is told from the third person point of view following Henry Fleming. By focussing on just one man we see the advance and retreat of Henry's emotions, first as he decides to enlist, motivated by dreams of glory; later, when he impatiently awaits the chance to prove to himself that he is not a coward; and finally in battle, when the assault on Henry's senses meets an improperly defended mind. Henry finds cowardice inside himself, but with the realization that cowardice is a kind of sense in senseless circumstances. Henry also finds courage within himself, but what seems to be courage can be the result of temporary madness.
Although the book follows Henry, he is often just called "the youth." Stephen Crane did not tell the story of a man in The Red Badge of Courage, but the story of every soldier. To accomplish this, he used an innovative technique, especially unusual in 1895 - he used very little characterization, depersonalizing the story in a way that allows the reader to march in Henry's shoes on the battlefield. The few other characters that are named besides Henry are likewise not developed. They are unimportant for our understanding of war.
Not only do the characters have remarkably few details, the battle itself is unnamed. In a short story published a year later called The Veteran we hear from a veteran soldier a tale of the battle of Chancellorsville, one of the bloodiest of the war. The details of the novel bear this up as the location.
The striking realism and detail of the book made many of Stephen Crane's contemporaries assume that he had been a soldier at the battle. In fact, he was not even alive at the time (living 1871-1900). The realism was possible because the horrors of war are timeless. So, too, is The Red Badge of Courage.
