Red badge of courage

The Red Badge of Courage, by its very title, is invested in color imagery and color symbols. While Crane uses color to describe, he also allows it to stand for whole concepts. Gray, for example, describes the both the literal image of a dead soldier and Henry Fleming's vision of the sleeping soldiers as corpses and comes to stand for the idea of death. In the same way, red describes both the soldiers' physical wounds …

…is literally the color of the grass, but figuratively the freshness and youth of the soldiers and the purity of the natural world. Red is, overwhelmingly the color of battle, of courage and gunfire and bloodshed. Gray, however, becomes the color of human defeat. Because Crane uses each so carefully and selectively, creating for each several meanings, they take on a significance of their own; each can stand alone to have its own charged meanings.