31 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen CraneAn Episode of War
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Lieutenant
The unnamed lieutenant, the story’s protagonist, begins the story focused on a very un-war-like task: divvying up the company’s coffee supply. The care with which he does this, almost achieving a “triumph of mathematics” before the bullet interrupts him, indicates a sense of fair-mindedness: the lieutenant is invested in doing a good job, and in being sure that the coffee ration is divided evenly (paragraph 2, sentence 3). This sense of fairness and its interruption help foreshadow the lack of fairness of fate, once he loses his arm by the end of the story.
As the story develops and the lieutenant is wounded, his character serves symbolically as a memento mori—a reminder of human mortality. The other characters around him react in varying ways, including fear (the orderly sergeant pulling away from him in paragraph 7) and with contempt (the surgeon in paragraph 18). The lieutenant himself feels a sense of awe and shame by his own status as a man wounded in war. During his interaction with the officer, who initially bandages his arm, he “[hangs] his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded” (paragraph 16, sentence 8). Later, with the surgeon, the lieutenant’s injury “evidently placed [him] on a very low social plane” (paragraph 18, sentence 5). It is this latter instance that causes a shift in the lieutenant’s character from having been “very meek” (paragraph 21, sentence 1) to defiance in the face of fate, though this defiance is ultimately fruitless. By the end of the story, he has become resigned, saying “I don’t suppose it matters so much as all that” (paragraph 24, sentence 3).
Surgeon
The surgeon plays a vital role in the story’s climactic moment. When he first sees the lieutenant, he is cordial, offering him a “Good morning” and a “friendly smile” (paragraph 18, sentence 2). However, as soon as he sees the wound, “his face at once change[s]” (paragraph 18, sentence 3). The lieutenant perceives the surgeon’s reactions to him as the surgeon attempts to provide medical treatment as “contempt” (paragraph 18, sentence 4) and “scorn” (paragraph 20, sentence 4). One of the interesting things about the surgeon’s character is that, as readers, it is difficult to determine if these are truly the surgeon’s reactions or simply the lieutenant’s (perhaps faulty) perception of his reactions. Ultimately, though, it does not really matter, since the main function of the surgeon is to prompt the lieutenant’s defiance based on these perceptions, facilitating the irony in the story’s ending.
The Orderly-sergeant
The orderly-sergeant is one of the first of the lieutenant's fellow soldiers to take any action after he has been shot. He helps the lieutenant replace his sword in his scabbard after he struggles, but his main function seems to be to represent the way uninjured soldiers view those who have suffered injuries. The point of view shifts slightly in the orderly-sergeant's paragraph (paragraph 7) from strictly his singular perception to a more generalized universal truth. After the orderly-sergeant declines to touch the lieutenant himself, the narrator says, "A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty" (paragraph 7, sentence 4). This sort of philosophical voice continues, discussing the access the wounded soldier is perceived to have to "revelations of all existence" (paragraph 7, sentence 6), which causes both awe and fear in his comrades. The point of view then returns to the orderly-sergeant, who had initially prompted the tangent: "And so the orderly-sergeant, while sheathing the sword, leaned nervously backward" (paragraph 7, sentence 9).
Officer
Once the lieutenant is behind the front lines, he comes across a number of unnamed, unidentified officers, one of whom plays a role in eliciting the lieutenant's shame and taking him through yet another stage of his feelings about his injury. This officer (paragraph 16) tells him that how he's gingerly holding his injured arm is "no way to do" (paragraph 16, sentence 4), and instead he ought to "fix that thing" (paragraph 16, sentence 5). As he helps the lieutenant do so, "[h]is tone allowed one to think that he was in the habit of being wounded everyday" (paragraph 16, sentence 9), causing the lieutenant to feel ashamed and hang his head. In contrast to the orderly-sergeant's fear and awe, the feeling here has shifted to something akin to dismissal, draining the wound of its nobility for the first time in the story--a process that will be completed by the surgeon.
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By Stephen Crane
