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Corpses
For Henry, wounds are a "red badge of courage" to show off like a Purple Heart medal—the modern military award given to soldiers wounded in combat. Henry wants a wound to prove that he fought bravely and sacrificed himself. But wounds in Red Badge are not that simple. They reveal the flip side of Henry's romantic ideas: the grim reality of war wounds. For example, after he's wounded, Jim looks like his whole side had been "chewed by wolves." Wounds reveal the ironies of war, too: when Henry gets his own wound, it comes when a fellow Union soldier strikes him with a rifle butt to get Henry out of his way. Henry then must lie to his regiment about the wound's origin. Wounds also don't have to be physical. The tattered man reflects Henry's internal wounds—his guilt for running away and abandoning people.
Wounds Quotes in The Red Badge of Courage
The The Red Badge of Courage quotes below all refer to the symbol of Wounds. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.
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Chapter 10
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The simple questions of the tattered man had been knife thrusts to him. They asserted a society that probes pitilessly at secrets until all is apparent. ... [H]is crime ... was sure to be brought plain by one of those arrows which cloud the air and are constantly pricking, discovering, proclaiming those things which are willed to be forever hidden.
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Chapter 12
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The fight was lost. The dragons were coming with invincible strides. The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the blood swollen god, would have bloated fill.
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Chapter 13
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"Yeh've been grazed by a ball. It's raised a queer lump jest as if some feller had lammed yeh on th' head with a club."
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Chapter 23
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The youth's friend went over the obstruction in a tumbling heap and sprang at the flag as a panther at prey. He pulled at it and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to the ground.
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Wounds Symbol Timeline in The Red Badge of Courage
The timeline below shows where the symbol Wounds appears in The Red Badge of Courage. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8
Henry runs into a column of bloodied wounded soldiers returning from the front. One laughs and sings hysterically; another complains about their general;...
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Walking along, Henry is approached by a dirty, tattered man with two wounds in his head and arm. The tattered man tries to strike up a conversation about...
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Chapter 9
Henry tries to blend in with the wounded soldiers. But after the tattered man's questions, he feels like they can perceive his guilt....
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...He stares into Jim's paste-like face and, when Jim's jacket falls away, sees Jim's awful wound. Agonized and enraged, Henry shakes his fist back at the battlefield.
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Chapter 10
...describes Henry as looking pretty bad and warns him to take care of his own wound, one that might be inside, one that he might not even feel. The tattered man...
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Chapter 12
Henry collapses in pain from the bleeding wound on his head, struggling even to crawl. He imagines somewhere safe he can collapse and...
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Chapter 13
The corporal inspects Henry's wound and concludes that he's been grazed by a bullet, finding "a queer lump jest as...
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