Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce

First published: 1891

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The American Civil War

Locale: The Battle of Chickamauga

Principal Characters:

• An unnamed boy, who is six years old
• Confederate soldiers, who have suffered a defeat

The Story

There is actually only one character in this story—the six-year-old boy who wanders away from his home and gets lost in the forest—and even he is not individualized but rather is presented simply as "the child." When he encounters defeated soldiers in retreat from the Civil War battle of Chickamauga, his response to them is one only of childish curiosity. Although the soldiers are grotesquely wounded, maimed, and bleeding, the boy sees them as circus animals and clowns, and instead of being horrified, as the reader is, he is delighted at having someone with whom to play. He uses his toy sword to lead the men back whence he has come, leaving many of them dying in a river as he makes his way home. When he reaches his home, he discovers that it is burning and his mother is dead, her brains blown out by an artillery shell. The story ends with the boy making inarticulate cries—"a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil." The reader's final shocking realization is that the child is a deaf-mute.

This climactic discovery "explains" the most striking aspect of the story—the disengaged and almost autistic response that the boy makes to the horrors of war. It is the gap between the boy's indifferent response and the reader's shock that gives the story the powerful impact that it has. Ambrose Bierce's most basic purpose here is to create an antiwar story; he does this by setting up a tension between an innocent, childish response to reality and an ironic adult one. The story begins with the narrator explaining that the boy is the son of a planter who had once been a soldier. As a result of the father's teaching the boy about war through books and pictures, the "warrior-fire" survives in the boy. In his play, he sees himself as the son of a heroic race, and he chases imaginary foes, putting all to death with his toy sword.

Thus, when the boy encounters the retreating soldiers, they become part of his play, creeping like babes instead of men through the forest. He has seen his father's slaves crawl on their hands and knees, playing horses with him; thus he crawls on the back of one of the dying men to ride him similarly. He laughs as he watches what to him is a merry spectacle and is as unaware as the men are of "the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity." Even when he returns to his burning home, he still reacts to the devastation as if it were merely spectacle, and he dances with glee around the fire, collecting more fuel to throw on the blaze. Only when he recognizes some of the buildings with "oddly familiar appearances, as if he had dreamed of them," does the plantation seem to swing around as if on a pivot, and he then realizes that it is his own home.

The fact that the boy is a deaf-mute emphasizes his childish fantasy world, detached from external reality, and makes more plausible the primary device of contrasting the child's view of war as a game with the adult's view of it as a horrifying actuality. It enables the author to set up a strange, dreamlike effect as the reader sees the events primarily from the boy's point of view. Even at the end of the story, the boy's inarticulate cries suggest a horrifying realization that goes beyond the ability of any language to express fully.

Bibliography

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Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Davidson, Cathy N., ed. Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Fatout, Paul. Ambrose Bierce, the Devil's Lexicographer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951.

Gale, Robert L. An Ambrose Bierce Companion. New York: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Grenander, Mary Elizabeth. Ambrose Bierce. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Hoppenstand, Gary. "Ambrose Bierce and the Transformation of the Gothic Tale in the Nineteenth-Century American Periodical." In Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

McWilliams, Carey. Ambrose Bierce: A Biography. 1929. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967.

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O'Connor, Richard. Ambrose Bierce: A Bibliography and a Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

Schaefer, Michael W. Just What War Is: The Civil War Writings of De Forest and Bierce. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

West, Richard. The San Francisco Wasp: An Illustrated History. Easthampton, Mass.: Periodyssey Press, 2004.