Free Indirect Style in The Red Badge of Courage

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Roswell K Bishop, killed at Battle of Chancellorsville (Library of Congress)

Set during the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage is about the “youth” Henry Fleming, who, having “dreamed of battles all his life,” joins the Union army. But at the front there is a problem. Henry “lay in his bunk pondering upon it. He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from battle.” Run he does. Joining a stream of wounded soldiers stumbling away from the action, he hides the fact that he’s unhurt, until, in a fight with another Union soldier, he is hit on the head. Eventually, after the fighting has ended, Henry rejoins his regiment. They care for him, thinking he’s been shot by the enemy. Next day, the regiment returns to the front, where Henry fights with blind fury, takes up the Union flag from a dying flag-bearer, and leads his comrades into the Confederate lines and victory.

But none of that is what the book’s about. Rather than the external facts, troop movements and battlefield tactics, it is Henry’s impression of it all, and, more importantly, his attempts to make sense of himself, that are the book’s topics. On one interpretation, it is novel of pessimism. Always pushed to act by social and psychological forces he does not control and cannot resist, Henry rationalizes but never understands. This is certainly true early on, when he deserts: that was the act of a coward, but Henry tells himself that “he had proceeded according to very correct and commendable rules. His actions had been sagacious things. They had been full of strategy. They were the work of a master’s legs.” The pessimist sees Henry’s delusions continue through the novel’s end. Charles Walcutt wrote:

If we were to seek a geometrical shape to picture the significant form of The Red Badge, it would not be the circle, the L, or the straight line of oscillation between selfishness and salvation, but the equilateral triangle. Its three points are instinct, ideals, and circumstances. Henry Fleming runs along the sides like a squirrel in a track...He is always controlled on one line, along which he is both drawn and impelled by the other two forces.

The optimists, on the other hand, see in the novel not “a demonstration that man is a beast with illusions,” but instead