It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.” The soldiers, to Henry, were akin to “animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit.” Once more he responds instinctively to danger. In the next skirmish, he is “not conscious that he is erect upon his feet” during a charge and “not aware of a lull” in the fighting a few minutes later. After the battle, in which the enemy is briefly routed, “It was revealed to him [note the passive voice] that he had been a barbarian, a beast.” More to the point, if he is not a hero (and how could he be, given that his response to danger was neither planned nor deliberate?), “he was now what he called a hero” (italics added). He had fallen asleep and, “awakening, found himself a knight,” at least in his own eyes.

Ironically, at this juncture Fleming learns of his comparative insignificance in the vast scheme of war. Far from the hero of his adolescent dreams, he is reduced to a cipher when he overhears a general order his regiment into battle like sheep to the slaughter. He experiences an epiphany: “the most startling thing was to learn suddenly that he was very insignificant.” The moment recalls one of Crane’s bitterly ironic poems:

A man said to the universe,
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

In a stupor, “unconsciously in advance” of his regiment, Fleming leads his compatriots into battle, though later he has no good idea “why he himself was there. . . . the youth wondered, afterward, what reasons he could have had for being there.” Like other naturalistic characters, Fleming inhabits a non-teleological, non-purposeful universe. Or like other soldiers in combat, he “showed a lack of a certain feeling of responsibility.” The novel is absolutely silent on the issues of slavery or states rights or any other reason usually invoked to justify the war. Rather, the soldiers’ conscious purpose for fighting has been supplanted by primitive emotion or, worse yet, unthinking “patriotism.” Fleming imagines “a despairing fondness” for the flag that symbolizes his nation, so much so that when the color sergeant is killed he “made a spring and a clutch at the pole” to save the emblem from touching the earth. He even eroticizes the Stars and Stripes: “It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes.” Ironically, Fleming and the other fighters charge within half a hundred feet of victory, not that they realize their failure until later. They are, after all, as pawn-like infantrymen “oblivious to all larger purposes of war.”

Fleming emerges from his so-called “battle madness” in the final chapter of the novel. But the conclusion of the text preserves or sustains its ambiguity. In the fourth to the final paragraph, Fleming declares that “He was a man”—an affirmation of his entry into adulthood, a sentence if read straightforwardly that would support a reading of the novel as an initiation story. But a few lines later, in the penultimate paragraph of the text, the reader learns that “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war.” To be a man is to be an animal, it seems. As John Condor concludes, “Far from bringing Henry into a world of freedom where he will operate as a free agent, the last chapter shows him developing new illusions. They are illusions that the battlefield itself exposed: e.g., the fiction that people are free and therefore morally responsible for their actions.”15

In short, The Red Badge of Courage may be read as an anti-war novel much as the movie Patton (1970), for example, may be viewed as an anti-war film. Fleming (=lemming?) may simply be a fool who suffers his illusions unself-consciously, and such a notion required a sophisticated point of view. Crane eschewed both an omniscient narrator who reliably describes the ebb and flow of objective reality and a first-person narrator whose perspective is blinded by the chaos and confusion of war. Instead, he developed a terse, impressionistic, and apprehensional style in which all events are mediated or refracted through Fleming’s consciousness and all the reader finally knows is the play of his imagination. The Red Badge of Courage essentially recounts through Fleming’s impressions the fears of an ironic hero or an anti-hero. Reality exists only insofar as Fleming apprehends it. Not only is there no objectivity to his story, the very notion of reality is a shifting, unstable, and distorted construction of his imagination and defies precise definition. Put another way, Crane had begun to develop naturalistic themes in an impressionistic or pointillistic style. For the record, Crane alluded explicitly to the French impressionists in his sketch “War Memories” (1899). As Sergio Perosa suggests,

The Red Badge of Courage is a triumph of impressionistic vision and impressionistic technique. Only a few episodes are described from the outside; Fleming’s mind is seldom analyzed in an objective omniscient way; very few incidents are extensively told. Practically every scene is filtered through Fleming’s point of view and seen through his eyes.