Critical Analysis of "The Red Badge of Courage"
Critical Analysis of "The Red Badge of Courage"
During the Civil War, a Union regiment is camped at a riverbank. A soldier named Jim Conklin spreads a rumor that the army will soon march. Henry Fleming, a recent recruit worries about his courage. He fears that if he were to see battle, he might run. The regiment is given orders to march, and the soldiers spend several days traveling on foot. Eventually they approach a battlefield. Upon arrival, the enemy charges. Henry, boxed in by his fellow soldiers, realizes that he could not run even if he wanted to. He fires automatically at the opposing soldiers. The Union regiments defeats the Confederate soldiers. Henry wakes from a brief nap to find that the enemy is again charging. Fear overtakes him this time and he leaps up and flees from the line. As he scampers across the landscape, he tells himself that he did the right thing, that his regiment could not have won, and that the men who remained to fight were fools. He passes a general on horseback and overhears the commander saying that the regiment has held back the enemy charge. Ashamed of his cowardice, Henry tries to convince himself that he was right to preserve his own life. He wanders through the forest in which he stumbles upon the decaying corpse of a soldier. Frightened, he runs away.
As time passes, Henry finds and joins a column of wounded soldiers marching down the road. He is jealous of these men, thinking that a wound is like "a red badge of courage." He meets a tattered man who has been shot twice and who says he is proud that his regiment did not run. He asks Henry where he is wounded, which makes Henry uncomfortable and forces him to hurry away to a different part of the column. He meets a soldier with a distant look on his face. Henry eventually recognizes the man as a badly wounded Jim Conklin. Henry promises to take care of Jim, but Jim runs from the line into a small grove of bushes where Henry and the tattered man watch him die.
Henry and the tattered soldier wander through the woods. Henry hears the rumble of combat in the distance. The tattered soldier continues to ask Henry about his wound, even as his own health visibly worsens. At last, Henry is unable to...