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"The Red Badge of Courage" opens on the eve of a rumored battle during the American Civil War. It is a union army regiment's first battle, and a young soldier's latent doubts about his courage begin to surface.

His doubts take him by surprise. He had thought of himself as courageous. Author Stephen Crane writes: "In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess." But his heroic vision of himself, even then, was not rooted in his present day reality, but rather in a distant past, drawing upon the heroic epics of Homer when instinctual urges were what drove men to act. He thought that the civilization of his day had advanced beyond the point where it became entrapped in circumstances that required courageous wartime acts. Crane continues: "But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches of the pages of the past."

As the Civil War begins, the young man is compelled to reevaluate his beliefs. "Tales of great movements shook the land," Crane writes. "They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them." He is swayed by newspaper's accounts of decisive victories. He envies the adulation showered upon other young men going off to war.

He enlists.

Cranes' narrative voice bolsters the feeling of alienation that the young soldier feels once he faces the prospect of actual combat and thinks that he is the only one afraid that his courage might fail him. The narrator uses no names. The protagonist is "the young soldier." His comrades are called by such labels as "the tall one" and "the loud one." Some characters are identified by rank, only.

The characters' dialog reveals some names. Through dialog we learn that the young soldier's name is Henry. But in the narration itself, all characters are anonymous. It seems almost like a case study where names of subjects are withheld to protect them. It's very appropriate for this novel, which is a psychological study. The inner turmoil within the young soldier provides the conflict that drives the story. The Civil War battles, themselves, are not fully described. The battles are filtered through the young soldier's dazed eyes, dreamlike images which lack coherency. The reader can never be sure which side is winning.

The young soldier can see no signs that any of his comrades doubt their own courage. His friend, "the tall private," tells him, "if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s'pose I'd start and run... But if everybody

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