Thesis

Henry has an excuse for EVERYTHING.

• 1.His excuse for losing the battles. (chapter 17)-
• He blames the general for the loss of battles rather than taking it upon himself to defeat and be bigger than that… to try. "Good Gawd," the youth grumbled, "we're always being chased around like rats! It makes me sick. Nobody seems to know where we go or why we go. We just get fired around from pillar to post and get licked here and get licked there, and nobody knows what it's done for. It makes a man feel like a damn' kitten in a bag. Now, I'd like to know what the eternal thunders we was marched into these woods for anyhow, unless it was to give the rebs a regular pot shot at us. We came in here and got our legs all tangled up in these cussed briers, and then we begin to fight and the rebs had an easy time of it. Don't tell me it's just luck! I know better. It's this derned old--" ( Crane16.30)… Henry feels that rather than taking matters into his own hands, he has to make excuses for himself.
• 2. His excuse for hiding from his regiment and the lies he will provide for them.-
- Rather than being a man and facing his regiment again after being lost, he hides because he’s afraid they’ll make fun of him for running. They find him anyway, but he tries to hide from them. He searched about in his mind for an adequate malediction for the indefinite cause, the thing upon which men turn the words of final blame. It--whatever it was--was responsible for him, he said. There lay the fault. The haste of the column to reach the battle seemed to the forlorn young man to be something much finer than stout fighting. Heroes, he thought, could find excuses in that long seething lane. They could retire with perfect self-respect and make excuses to the stars. (Crane 11.7-8)
• 3. His excuse for running away.-
- Throughout the story Henry thinks he has to prove himself to everyone and explain to himself why he did it and if he was right in doing it. He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached. He had done a good part in saving himself, who was a little piece of the army. He had considered the time, he said, to be one in which it was the duty of every little piece to rescue itself if possible (Crane 7.4). Then when he came about the squirrel, he felt that putting something else in danger would prove that what he did was right. Feeling that it was okay to do wrong to someone else just to prove himself. The youth felt triumphant at this exhibition. There was the law, he said. Nature had given him a sign. The squirrel, immediately upon recognizing danger, had taken to his legs without ado. He did not stand stolidly baring his furry belly to the missle, and die with an upward glance at the sympathetic heavens. On the contrary, he had fled as fast as his legs could carry him; and he was but an ordinary squirrel, too--doubtless no philosopher of his race. The youth wended, feeling that Nature was of his mind. She re-enforced his argument with proofs that lived where the sun shone (Crane 7.15). He showed that his childish ways were nowhere near gone, when doing wrong to something else just to show he was right. Grrr.