The Red Badge of Courage

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In The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway's ribald parody of Sherwood Anderson, the hero Yogi Johnson remembers the War:

In a good soldier in the war it went like this: First, you were brave because you didn't think anything special could hit you, because you yourself were something special, and you knew that you could never die. Then you found out different. You were really scared then, but if you were a good soldier you functioned the same as before. Then after you were wounded and not killed, with new men coming on, and going through your old processes, you hardened and became a good hard-boiled soldier. Then came the second crack, which is much worse than the first, and then you began doing good deeds and being the boy Sir Philip Sidney, and storing up treasures in heaven. At the same time, of course, functioning always the same as before. As if it were a football game.22

The passage is surprising for a number of reasons. It is anomalous to The Torrents of Spring, which is entirely farcical, in the seriousness of its tone. It is a concise description of a process that preoccupied Hemingway through all of his literary career. And it follows, with certain minor differences, the developmental scheme Stephen Crane appears to have set up for himself in connection with his hero Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage,14 even to his finally racing over the battlefield, ducking “his head low like a football player.” (p. 90)

The parallel extends finally off the printed page to the lives of the two men. Both men were subject to that “thirst for abstract danger,” as Malcolm Cowley calls it,11 to an excessive degree. They