Summary and Analysis of Chapter 5-8
Chapter 5 Summary: The waiting makes Henry think of his home and all its images. Suddenly, someone cries, "Here they come!" Beyond the smoke, a brown swarm of men begins running down the hill. A general comes up on his horse, yelling to a colonel that the men have to hold them back. Henry sees the colonel regarding his men with resentment after the general gallops away. The captain of Henry's company coaxes the troops to reserve their fire and not shoot wildly. Henry sweats out of pure nervousness. The fight is about to begin. Before he himself is ready or even consciously decides, he lowers his rifle and fires the first shot of the battle. Henry then loses concern for himself, and becomes "not a man but a member." Whatever he was part of, it was in a critical state; and he was part of its desire. What it did then was blast loudly. The noise of the firing reassures Henry in a certain way. The furious haste and noise make the atmosphere even more confusingsweat blisters, his eyes are hot, and the blasts burn in his ears. He is not fighting the enemy men so much as the swirling battle phantoms that surround him. He hears men speak around him as if he were sleeping. No one has a heroic pose. They are moving as fast as they can, reloading and then firing almost at random in the smoke in front of them. The lieutenant of the company encounters a soldier fleeing in terror and beats him back into the ranks. Men occasionally drop from being hit. Eventually the firing recedes, and the men begin to rejoice. They have driven back the enemy. They attempt to recollect themselves. It takes Henry some moment to come back to his senses. He realizes the grime and smoke makes him choke. He looks at the men still standing and simply enjoys being able to look around. On the ground there lay a few contorted bodies. A battery still throws shells over the troops towards the enemy. Henry looks around and takes in the whole scene, moving horses, wounded men, and flags. Henry feels these flags look like beautiful birds that have lasted a storm. Then he looks and notices the beautiful blue of the sky. Chapter 5 Analysis: Finally, Henry sees a battle in this chapter. The enemy troops come rushing out of the grayness and smoke in front of his regiment. His doubts still live on in his head, until he actually begins to fire. The change from Henry's head to Henry's communal action, first suggested by Wilson's package in chapter three, comes out fully here. Henry is no longer aware of himself as a person. He acts instead as a member of some greater force. However, the narrator does not describe exactly what this body is. Rather than one particular thing, he gives a list: regiment, army, cause, and country. It does not matter what exactly it is. He just feels the panic of self-preservation. Yet, it is important that the "self" is a group or collective of some sort. Up until now, most of what we have followed has been Henry's thoughts. He has largely lived in his own head. Now, he is not the only person he is concerned of. There are greater organisms that he is a part of, and he fights for their preservation as much as his. Interestingly, this means that the troops in Henry's regiment, who have been looking at so much smoke and gray, must create it themselves. The smoke that clouds their vision is as more from their own rifles as the enemy's. While he fights more against "swirling battle phantoms" than other men, Henry is creating the smoke of battle and the smoke of uncertainty himself, along with the other troops. The organism he is a part of, which we cannot describe exactly, is also covered with the same smoke of mystery and unknowing. Henry only knows how to act, not how to think. This is apparent when Henry finally stops fighting. He fired and reloaded with a furious, mechanical speed. Only when the battle is over does he realize how the smoke chokes him. He sees the cannon shoot behind him, the corpses on the ground, and the blue of the sky. The world has become a picture again, not a world of action. However, something is changed. "Blue" here does not stand for the men's uniform or Henry's brooding; it is that of a blue sky, of optimism and tranquility. It is this peacefulness of Nature that Henry feels as the chapter closes. Chapter Six Summary: As Henry becomes more and more aware, he is relieved. The trial has been passed and the difficulties of war have been vanquished. He feels good about himself. He and the other men exchange pleasantries about the weather and shake hands. But this good feeling does not last for longthe enemy attacks again. Masses of troops begin to swell out of the grove on the opposite side of the field. Shells from enemy cannon begin to explode in the grass and trees. The glow fades from the men's eyes. They complain about not having replacements; they groan about aching joints. Henry is convinced that this is a mistake; and the advancing troops will stop, apologize, and turn around. He is wrong. The battle starts again as the Union troops open fire on the field. Henry, the youth, begins to quiver. He feels numb. He is convinced that his foes are machines of steel. He stops firing to peer through the smoke. All he can see is faint views of the ground, covered with men, running like imps and yelling. He waits horrified, feeling as if he could shut his eyes and be eaten. A man near him, who had been working on his rifle, suddenly stops and runs screaming. Others begin to run. Henry then yells with fright, swings about, and charges for the rear. He loses his rifle and cap, and his open coat sways in the breeze as he runs. He loses all direction of safety. The lieutenant suddenly jumps, red-faced, in front of Henry, attempting to keep him there. He swings with his sword. Henry simply continues to run blindly. He falls a few times. As he runs, he sees others running along side him and hears running behind him. He is convinced the regiment is fleeing, chased by the crashing shells. He continues to run up to the Union battery. Cannon shots go overhead as he speeds through them. The men working the guns seem calm and collected, unaware of their impending doom. They stand on a smoke-wreathed hill. Henry feels pity for the poor, unaware fools as he runs. He sees other troops running into battle. Henry is filled with wonder at these fools, speeding to feed the war god. He runs so far he comes up to a hill where the general and his staff are standing on their horses. Henry considers telling him of the carnage and terror. He also considers thrashing him for his poor judgment and behavior. How could he stay still while such destruction was going on? The general then calls on an assistant to direct a brigade to send a regiment to the center, where Henry was, for it is in danger of breaking. The assistant returns in a moment with news that the regiment has held. Henry's feeling that doom was eminent turned out not to be true. The general jostles excitedly on his horse. Chapter 6 Analysis: As Henry become more and more aware after the battle, he and his fellow soldiers experience a reprieve. They believe that the battle is over; their trials have passed. Yet, when the Rebel army comes again, they must get up and recreate the grayness and clouds of smoke again. Henry loses himself again, but this time not in a way that leads him to fight. He feels that he is about to be eaten by "a red and green monster"the monster of war and death, which these two colors represent. As men around him begin to flee, Henry loses his nerve and runs in terror. As he runs, he is no longer engaged in the battle at all. As soon as he turns, all the things he sees are not part of some whole that he is one of, as was in the previous chapter when the battle began. All the things he seesthe lieutenant, the battery, the generalare now not part of him. He assumes that he is above them all. It is Henry's superior observation and senses that lead him to flee the battle scene. All those who stay are fools who will soon be devoured by that same red and green monster that Henry fled. He even goes as far to feel that the general of the troops is a fool who knows not what he is doing. They are all machines or fools, not higher beings like he. To match this, the images we get are mostly peripheral. This follows Henry's vision. He does not stop until he reaches the general. He has thoughts about the men and the battery, for example. Yet for the most part, he does not pay attention to them. Their images are fleeting, vague senses of men running. The most fleeting image, which we never actually see, is that red and green monster in pursuit of Henry. He is convinced he hears it behind him as he runs. However, he is wrong about impending doom. His regiment held their ground. He does not find this until he stops running, and his vision is still. His reaction to this discovery begins in the next chapter. Chapter 7 Summary: Henry recoils in horror upon hearing that his regiment is victorious. He looks in the direction of the battle and sees a yellow fog along the treetops. He feels wronged. He fled, he tells himself, because annihilation was approaching. As a little piece of the army, he did a good job in saving himself. He thinks his actions to be wise, given the situation. He thinks of his comrades, dressed in blue. They had won. The thought makes him bitter. He, the enlightened one, had fled because of his greater perception. They would not see it like that, however. He thinks about the derisions and insults he will have to bear upon returning to his regiment. He pities himself, as if an injustice against him was committed. The guilt of having run away overwhelms Henry. He plods along, his brain in a fit of agony and despair. He goes into a thick wood, trying to hide himself. The underbrush is thick, and he travels slowly. He keeps going and going into the darkness. Soon the sound of the guns is faint. He notices more things of the forestthe sun, insects, and birds. Nature seems to not hear the rumble of death. Henry is relieved and relaxed by the landscape. It carries a sense of peace. He throws a pine cone at a squirrel, who runs away in fear. This also settles Henry's mind. The squirrel did not stand still in front of the thrown object; it ran away, trying to preserve itself. Henry continues walking until he gets to a swamp. The sounds of the battle are barely audible. He goes into a small clearing with light streaming down from above, as in a church. What he sees horrifies him. A corpse sits against a tree in front of him. The uniform was blue, but had faded to green. His eyes were dull and looked like those of a dead fish. His mouth hung open, and small ants ran across his face. Henry shrieks but stands still, looking at it for a long time. Then, the youth put one hand behind him and backed away slowly. As he goes away, he still faces the corpse, afraid that if he turns on it, it will chase him stealthily. As he goes through the branches, he gets small suggestions to touch the corpse. The thought makes him shudder. At last he turns around and runs, thinking of the sight of small ants. After a bit, he pauses, imagining a voice coming from the dead man's throat and yelling at him. Silence dominates the small chapel of the forest. Chapter 7 Analysis: Henry's reaction to finding his perceptions of impending doom were incorrect is a similar mix of emotions that we saw before. Though they are now more intense. He is no long postulating on what may one day happen. He has run from the battle. And he must now figure out how to interpret his own feelings. At first he feels as if he has been caught committing a crime. He then looks towards the battlefield. Above the forest where he was fighting, he sees a yellow fog. This is an incredibly important metaphor. The color of cowardice, yellow, covers his view of the past battle and his actions. Though he moves almost instantly to thoughts of his superior intelligence justifying his running, he is in no way "sagacious" as he believes. He is still very young. He panicked during battle and ran. The yellow fog represents an overlying emotion to the battle and Henry's thoughts about it. The reason his actions can be seen as cowardice is not because he ran trying to preserve himself. He ran because he was convinced that his regiment was about to be annihilated. Because this is not true, he must reorganize his own thoughts about what he just did. To do this, he walks into a different wood, trying to get away from the battle. In the forest, the sounds of the battle grow quiet. His "return to Nature" is somewhat akin to Thoreau's in Walden. He attempts to take lessons from nature in some way. Yet, what he is doing is not learning from nature, but rather finding some kind of justification for his actions. When he muses on the squirrel running from his thrown pinecone and how it somehow explains his running from danger, he is only explaining a situation that has already happened. The interpretation is not valid. Nature is not a place of peace, as he believes. It can be, for the forest is quiet. Yet, his encounter with the corpse proves it is not. The uniform, which used to be the blue of the Union army, has faded to green, the same color as the dragon from which he fled during battle. In this place of peace, Henry meets that same green animal of death. He is once again filled with horror. He runs from the green-colored corpse, but in a different way than when he fled the green monster of battle. He tries to perceive the corpse as he leaves. He first sneaks away backwards, watching the body to make sure it will not rise up again. When he finally turns and runs, he is not thinking of a metaphor, of the force of battle; he is thinking of the one corpse, with its flesh and eyes. He does imagine things that are not there, like the corpse's voice. Yet even one person by himself away from the battle must face some form of death. He could not get away from this, even though he tried. Chapter 8 Summary: Henry continues on through the forest. He hears loud crashes and roars through the darkening sky. It seems as if the world is being torn. Henry's mind is going in all directions at once. He feels that the two armies are going at each other in a panther-like fashion. He then runs, ironically, in the direction of the battle, more two witness the collision of the armies than to participate. As he runs, the forest becomes silent and still. Henry feels that the fight he had fled from was not a struggle, but instead a small skirmish. He doubts that he has seen a real battle. He feels silly for having taken the situation so seriously. He was not carving his name in the tablet of history; it would not even garner a headline in a newspaper. However, he feels that is just fine, otherwise every soldier would run in battle to save himself. The noises still describe a large battle. The brambles of the forest grab him as he runs. Eventually he sees long gray walls of the battle lines. He stands awestruck of the fight. He then proceeds along his way. The complexity of the fight fascinates him. He wants to go close and see it make corpses. He climbs a fence. Five corpses lie on the other side in a road. He scampers away, afraid to disturb them. He soon encounters a procession of wounded soldiers making their way down the road. They are cursing and moaning. One with a wound in his foot hops and laughs hysterically. One swears he has been shot because of the general's mismanagement. Another sings nonsense lyrics to old nursery rhymes. They hang and move dragging their limbs. A wounded officer comes up, demanding that they make way. They do so with irritation, making short remarks as he passes by. A tattered soldier, wounded in his head and arm, comes up to the youth. He wants to converse about the battle. Henry can barely say anything as the man babbles on. Soon the tattered man asks him where he has been hit. The question makes Henry panic. Embarrassed, he stutters to the man; then he bends his head away and picks at his uniform. Chapter 8 Analysis: "A crimson roar from the distance" breaks the tranquility of the forest. This color signifies war and conflict once again. Yet, what truly interrupts the peace, more than the fighting itself, is its gruesome outcomes. Henry had a glance of this in the previous chapter, when encountering the corpse in the forest. Soon he will see the effects of the war on the bodies of men. He can see the gray of battle from where he stands. He is long away from the grayness; but upon the road, he soon sees men wounded from that battle from which he fled. They are bloodstained, with both new and old blood, looking red and black. Between battle and the dead are these men. They have the marks of war obviously upon them, and it turns them into walking specters. Henry has been imagining these ghosts of battle for a long time. Now he sees and interacts with them. They are so unlike the real living as soldiers that they do not defer quietly to an officer, and even insult him, something no real soldier would do. One tattered soldier approaches him in all this. What is interesting about this man is the amount he speaks. Henry, so caught up in his own considerations, musings, and emotions, cannot think of a thing to say, even when asked direct questions. This man has facility of language, and uses it thoroughly. Henry has not yet mastered it, having fled from his battle. He cannot speak about it or his wounds, for he knows nothing about them. In this context, this tattered man is full of words. He knows both about battle and wound. Therefore, his direct questions cut Henry to the quick. They show his immaturity and cowardice, though they do so without malice. Henry cannot process these and, like before when faced with an unknown, runs away.
ClassicNote on Red Badge of Courage
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