Lowest Price Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage (Barron's Book Notes)

Stephen Crane's best-known work remains singularly powerful more than a century after publication, a remarkably vivid acid-trip-like ride told in a grippingly naturalistic way. The product of a man in his mid-20s who had never been closer to war than military school and veteran's parades, "Red Badge Of Courage" captures both the lulls and terrors of combat as experienced in the Civil War.

Henry Fleming is a young man newly recruited to the Union cause. When his regiment, the 304th New York, is put on the front line, the youth recoils from a strong Confederate attack and finds himself wandering the broken hinterlands of the battlefield. As the war around him continues, another war goes on inside Henry as he tries to convince himself he is not a coward. But only battle will restore his sense of self.

The edition I read is billed as the "only complete edition", from Crane's original manuscript. People who complain that the later final edition is too purple for its own good would probably dislike this even more. There's more of Fleming's internal struggle, and more adjectives. Certainly editing had its advantages. I don't think one of "Red Badge's" most famous lines benefits from the adjective "fierce", as in "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a fierce wafer."

But there are compensatory benefits to this editions. While narrating Henry's various self-justifications for his running away from battle, some of which have a ring of meretricious substance about them, there is this nice line, excised from the final text: "...he peers into the core of things and sees that the judgment of man is thistle-down in wind".

Editor Henry Binder overstates how much of the editing was to the novel's detriment, arguing that it obscures Crane's message of Fleming as a badly-flawed character only made worse after answering Mars' call to duty at last. Fleming doesn't strike me as guilty of more than being a kid in a tricky situation, out on his own for the first time in the most testing of circumstances. I've never been to war, but I identified with the highly vivid journey of self-discovery Henry takes. It's to Crane's credit he keeps so much of Fleming under the table, even barely referencing him by name. That way he becomes an everyman, and a reader surrogate.

What kind of takeaway does Crane desire from his readers? Was it, to echo a title of a later Crane poem, that "War is kind"? "He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion," Crane writes of Fleming. "Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy."

Yet you also get vividly horrific descriptions of dead bodies reeking in the sun, and senseless death and suffering.

Ultimately Crane probably saw war as a natural byproduct of humanity and an uncaring universe, neither good nor bad. It's a limited philosophical construct, perhaps, but one that "Red Badge" makes a case for in bold, unforgettable hues.Get more detail about Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage (Barron's Book Notes).