x to be reduced to any scheme. And an attempt to do so can become so intricate that the critic is likely to forget what The Red Badge of Courage is really about: a terrified young man trying come to terms with the realities of war.
First, let us consider the novel's narrative voice: third person limited. Crane is very strict about this. The point of view is Henry's and no one elses. This makes it all the more remarkable that, throughout The Red Badge of Courage, Crane rarely tells us what Henry is thinking. Instead, he shows us what Henry is experiencing, bringing all five senses vividly into play - with particular attention to light and color. And through this rigorous practice of showing and not telling, Crane manages to convey Henry's inner experience.
The book, then, is virtually a chronological list of Henry's impressions of warfare. For this reason, The Red Badge of Courage has often been called an impressionistic book. R.W. Stallman, a Crane scholar and Crane's biographer, has written:
Crane anticipated the French post-impressionist painters. His style . . . is composed of disconnected images, which, like the blobs of color in a French impressionist painting, coalesce one with another, every word-group having a cross- reference relationship, every seemingly disconnected detail having interrelationship to the configurated pattern of the whole (Stallman 196).
When we look at an impressionist painting, our first priority is not to analyze it according to some scheme. Instead, we surrender ourselves to the sensory experience of the artist. If the painting has symbols, we let them reach us intuitively, not rationally. Similarly, when we are shown colors in The Red Badge of Courage, we are not getting snippets of "meaning" to be strung together into a coherent scheme.
...