“Becoming Another Thing”: Traumatic and Technological Transformation in The Red Badge of Courage

For the last century, critics have argued about whether or not the protagonist of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is “transformed” at the conclusion of the novel. After two days of fighting the Confederate army in Virginia,1 Henry Fleming feels that he has overcome and been redeemed from his initial cowardice on the battlefield and can now emphatically announce that “He [is] a man” and that his “soul [has] changed” (Crane, 1895/2008, pp. 103-4). Such a change seems to justify the desire Fleming feels at the novel's beginning to enlist in the army. In fact, one of the principal reasons Fleming wants to go to war is that repeatedly reading Homer and others has “taught [him] that a man became another thing in a battle” (p. 21). He hopes to experience this transformation himself, believing that after “mingl[ing] in one of those great affairs of the earth” he will have attained transfiguring glory, even if this glory is “not…distinctly Homeric” (pp. 4-5). Fleming's assertion of newly attained manhood is undercut, however, by the narrator's tendency to refer to him as “the youth” throughout the novel, including in the final chapter where Fleming declares his “soul changed.” While Fleming seems convinced that he has indeed “become another thing” following battle,