The Blurred Line of Reality: An Essay on The Red Badge of Courage

In Stephen Crane's magnum opus, The Red Badge of Courage, a young boy named Henry Fleming enthusiastically volunteers to join the Union Army in the Civil War, his mind jam-packed with ideas of heroism, courage, and honor on the battlefield. Ironically enough, though, when the time comes for Fleming to display any one of the aforementioned traits, he lets his cowardice get the better of him and flees the battle. What ensues is a moral dilemma in which Fleming repeatedly lies both to himself and the reader, relentlessly blurring the line between fact and fiction.

As a narrator, Fleming proves to be a consistently poor provider of information. His statements are most often falsehoods, as he tries to make himself feel better about his cowardice with a blatant disregard for the factuality of his testimonials. Says Fleming at one point in the passage: "His actions had been sagacious things. They had been full of strategy. They were the work of a master's legs" (Crane 44). Of course, the reader knows this not to be true. Fleming says these things, and others like them, in an attempt to reassure himself that it was adeptness of judgment, not fear, that drove him to do what he did in the face of danger. It is in this way that Crane attempts to blur the line between reality and fiction, further making a point that the art of storytelling in and of itself is one of lies and deception, albeit unknowingly at times.

It is a strange notion to ponder, that makes one question the truth of literature in general. If a narrator could lie so easily to himself and the reader, who knows what other lies have been told that have been passed off as truths. Truly it provides a deep insight into human psychology, in that most people really do lie to themselves and those around them if it fits their needs. The whole art of storytelling hinges on the reliability of the person telling the story, which makes it a very fragile form of entertainment.

With Fleming as our narrator, the fragility of it all becomes clear. The whole way the story is told changes because of him, and the reader is fed false and misleading information, like when he states that, "he was trodden beneath the feet of an iron injustice. He had proceeded with wisdom and from the most righteous motives...only to be frustrated by hateful circumstances" (Crane 44). This level of disconnect between what really happened and the way Fleming interprets events and passes these events on to the reader creates an interesting dynamic in which it becomes hard to separate fact from fiction. Of course, this could very well be the point Crane is trying to make: that there will always be a certain level of fuzziness when it comes to the truth of the written word; black and white areas won't be easily defined. Then again, nearly all of Red Badge, is riddled with questionable moral "gray" areas so it would only make sense that the narration would be the same way.