Imagery
and Metaphor
Crane employs a colorful style that abounds in vivid sensory
images, as well as similes and metaphors. Opening the book at
almost any page, especially in the battle scenes, will produce
examples.
War is presented in a variety of metaphorical ways. (A metaphor
is a figure of speech in which one object is identified with
another object. The purpose is to invest the first object with
one or more qualities possessed by the second object.) War is
a “red animal” and a “blood-stained god.”
The war-as-god metaphor occurs several times. It conveys the
idea that war is something much larger than the collection of
individuals that participate in it, and they have no control
over it. It transcends them.
Animal imagery of
varying kinds occurs frequently in connection with battle. It
makes the point that war turns humans into animals, acting from
instinct rather than reason. On one page alone for example (p.
110), the enemy are “like flies sucking insolently at
his [Henry’s] blood”; the fighters resemble “animals
tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit”; and the
army line “curled and writhed like a snake stepped upon.”
Later, Henry plunges toward the enemy flag like a “mad
horse.” (These are similes, in which something is compared
to something else that on the surface is very unlike it. The
simile brings out some way in which the two things are similar.)
There are many more
similes regarding battle. They include Henry’s perception
that battle “was like an immense and terrible machine”;
the description of the two armies engaging “like a pair
of boxers”; and the image of bullets raining down like
a “thousand axes.”
The Union flag is
the subject of two metaphors, coming one after the other: “It
was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious
gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving,
that called him with the voice of his hopes” (p. 123).
The metaphors are appropriate because they help to explain why
the flag is so cherished, and why the standard-bearers in battle
hold on to the flag as if their lives depended on it.
The literary technique
known as the pathetic fallacy is frequently employed. The pathetic
fallacy is when natural objects are invested with human feelings
or emotions. The trees “tremble with eagerness”
(p. 13) for example. The battle flag in the wind “seemed
to be struggling to free itself from an agony” (p. 42).
Then in the next paragraph, “The flag suddenly sank down
as if dying. Its motion as it fell was a gesture of despair.”
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