Henry Flemming Character Analysis

Henry Flemming is an incredibly realistically portrayed character, in the book The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, who voluntarily enlists in the army for the Civil War. This book takes the reader on a journey through Henry’s experiences with the war itself – enlisting, marching, preparing for battle, fighting, healing, and more fighting. The author uses Henry Flemming – the myths he has about what it is like to serve in the army, what strength it takes to survive a battle, and how a person’s morals playout on the battlefield – to properly confront and debunk these myths about what warfare life was like during the Civil War. The 304th regiment, the company Henry joined up with, is able to become fully transformed from a simple group

These decisions are often irrational, dangerous judgements that just happen to appear as selfless acts. For example, when Henry first decides to continue on with his regiment to battle, he does so only under the thought that it is better to go to war and die having “tried” to fight rather than be caught running away as a coward. This could be seen as Henry confronting his fears, but to me, in that moment, it was Henry giving up on trying in life, choosing to die rather than stay a mental outcast as the only soldier afraid to die. Another time, when Henry Flemming was so engrossed in the fighting that he felt as if he didn’t even know where the ground was, he fought so hard that he did not realize there was a break in the shooting, causing his company to worry and stare in disbelief at his level of focus on the enemy that somehow coincided with a lack of reality. The glory of war like the Greeks and the feelings of guilt and embarrassment if he ran instead of fighting both could have motivated him to reach this point. Ultimately, in order to survive the war, Henry was shocked and focused into fighting the rebels in order to stay

The whole of these points, that also rang true within the narrative of Crane’s novel, was that companies and regiments were engrained in their sense of community. Not only was there much communication within intimate relationships of a soldier and his lady back home, but there were newspaper to help spread the gossip and visits from community members to vouch for the gossip through firsthand experience. While it did not appear to be as blatant in The Red Badge of Courage, the opinions of others within his unit and back in his community meant very much. This is shown in Henry’s desires for death over the embarrassment of coming back from battle unscratched. Although coming back without any wartime injuries is supposed to be good, Flemming assigned personal honor and glory to battle, believing you could not have been in battle if you were not hurt. This did initially inspire the Northern men, as it did for Flemming, but it also gave them the strong pressures, as Henry felt, to hold themselves accountable for their actions on the battlefield, too. Overall, while The Northern Soldier and His Community was more of an individual-level of reasoning for pride, glory, and embarrassment, The Red Badge of Courage’s Henry Flemming was mostly concerned for how his