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.
Symbols & Motifs
Coffee
In the story, coffee serves as a contrasting element, a symbol of the soldiers’, and especially the lieutenant’s, lives outside of wartime. The quotidian nature of the story’s first action also serves to give the lieutenant being shotmore impact by the inherent contrast. We see the lieutenant’s sense of fairness in the care with which he divides the coffee, and it also represents a moment of near-triumph before his downfall. Later in the story, coffee returns and serves to contrast the story’s two main settings: the front line and behind the lines. After the lieutenant has left to seek medical attention, he sees “a brigade […] making coffee and buzzing with talk like a girl’s boarding school” (paragraph 16, sentence 1). The carefree and decidedly civilian scene of coffee being made behind the lines serves to highlight the contrasting danger of the opening scene of the story on the battlefront.
Sword
Although appearing only briefly in the narrative, the lieutenant’s sword provides a valuable symbolic function. After being shot in the arm while holding the sword, the lieutenant is forced to shift it awkwardly to his other hand, and then:
he looked at the sword as he held it there, and seemed puzzled as to what to do with it. In short, this weapon had of a sudden became a strange thing to him. He looked at it in a kind of stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, a spade (paragraph 5, sentence 4).
In this passage, the sword, a symbol of war and of the lieutenant’s position as a participant in that war as a soldier “becomes strange” to him, showing the changed perception he has of the war and later seems to him to be more like “a trident, a scepter, a spade.” The last one in particular shows the contrast between his life as a soldier and the life he led prior to the story, perhaps as a man tending a garden with a spade.
Smoke
There are two important instances where smoke plays a role in the narrative. The first occurs early on, in the third paragraph: “He looked sadly, majestically, over the breastwork at the green face of a wood, where now were many puffs of white smoke” (paragraph 3, sentence 3). Here, the smoke represents an abstracted and mysterious danger. While the reader is able to decipher that the smoke is coming from the barrels of rifles, one of which has wounded the lieutenant, it is almost as if the lieutenant himself cannot seem to connect the smoke he sees to the danger it represents. However, later in the story, after the lieutenant has retreated to the hospital at the rear of the encampment, he sees a man “[s]itting with his back against a tree […] with a face as gray as a new army blanket […] serenely smoking a corncob pipe. The lieutenant wished to rush forward and inform him that he was dying” (paragraph 17, sentence 8). Here, the lieutenant has regained his faculties after the initial shock of being wounded, and now sees this new iteration of smoke as portentous of the man’s mortality.
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By Stephen Crane
