The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [16]
Dickinson and Symbolism encouraged Crane to infuse prose with poetic devices. Symbols abound in Red Badge, from “the red sun ... pasted in the sky like a wafer” to Wilson’s “packet” that he instructs Fleming to send home if he should be killed. One significant recurring symbol is the battle standard of the regiment. Throughout the novel, Crane avoids interjecting a patriotic dimension. Instead, the text promotes both a functional and a philosophical purpose. Amid the confusion of a battlefield, a private desperately seeks for any sign of where he belongs and of what he should be doing. In such instances throughout Red Badge, the soldiers of the 304th follow not the orders of their superiors but the flag. When Fleming wrests the standard from the hands of a dying comrade, he symbolically tries to grab control of his environment. Through brute will, he leads the regiment in its final assault upon the Rebel stronghold. For a moment, he metaphorically masters his hostile environment—but only for a moment. More than anything else, Crane’s Impressionistic uniqueness owes its character to his Symbolist eye for poetic concision and for the suggestive richness of images.
Stephen Crane’s religious upbringing, his experiences among New York’s poor, his encounters with Realism, Romanticism, Gothicism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and Symbolism, and many other influences are all present and carefully coordinated in this deceptively simple novel. For Crane, no one aesthetic, creed, philosophical presumption, or practical experience could consistently explain every second in an individual’s life. One stifling event might lend itself to a Naturalist interpretation; the next might stolidly support a Realist perspective. Just as the correspondent of “The Open Boat” has the ability and responsibility to articulate the fear and frustration of his ship-mates, the American writer has the capacity to reproduce in prose the riot of possibilities that the individual mind contemplates while trying to fathom its uncertain place in the universe. Fleming’s sensibility shifts so often and so smoothly that we recognize how amazingly illuminating Crane was in portraying the restless nature of human thought.
After the composition of Red Badge, Crane went on to become a famous writer, a daring journalist, and a self-consuming traveler through life. From 1895 onward, his life reads like the script of an improbable biopic. Working as a roving correspondent for a New York newspaper, he effected a desperate escape to avoid being murdered by Mexican bandits, an experience that he later fictionalized in “One Dash—Horses.” Later, back in New York City, he sided with a prostitute in her claim that she was falsely arrested. In doing so, Crane earned the rancor of all the police in the city to the degree that he had to flee New York to escape their unflagging harassment. Next, in Florida, he boarded a filibustering vessel laden with arms and rebels, so that he could report about the insurgency in Cuba. The next day, on the Atlantic, the boat sank. His precarious rescue later formed the basis for “The Open Boat.” Back in Florida, he met and pursued a relationship with a flamboyant adventuress, Cora Taylor, who eventually became his common-law wife. He then covered a war between Turkey and Greece, discovering in the process that his insights about human behavior during combat in Red Badge were valid. He was living in England