The
anti-war theme of Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" depends on the
basic tensions between child world and adult world and between fantasy and
reality. The boy's fantasy world of
playing at war is his only reality; consequently, when he encounters the
genuine external reality of war it seems curiously fantastic to him; thus he is
able to integrate it effortlessly into his fantasy play world.
Bierce
develops the story on the ironic realization that the adult view of war often
springs from child-like views in which men glorify battle, only to find out too
late that the reality of it is horror and death. The primary communicators of this fantasy
image of war in Bierce's story are books and pictures which glorify war, for
the boy has been taught "postures of aggression and defense" by the
"engraver's art." Thus when he
encounters the actuality of war, the boy responds to it as if it were merely
the fantasy pictures he has seen or the world of play-reality he has known.
As is
typical of many Bierce stories, style and technique are practically everything
in "Chickamauga." Although
Bierce was writing during a period of American Literature characterized by
realistic depictions of external reality, Bierce maintained his allegiance to
romanticism. Often compared with Edgar
Allan Poe, Bierce focuses not so much on external reality but rather on the
strange dream-like world that lies somewhere in between fantasy and reality. Thus, the genius of his stories depends not
so much on the theme, which is often fairly obvious, but on the delicate and
tightly controlled way that Bierce tells the story and creates a nightmarish
world that involves the reader emotionally.
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 Bierce
to set up a strange dreamlike effect as we see the events primarily from the
boy's point of view.
However, even as the story depends on Bierce's
developing the perspective of the child, in which the reader is made to see the
maimed and bleeding soldiers as circus clowns and child-like playmates, this
point of view is counterpointed by that of an adult teller--sometimes in a
developed background exposition, sometimes in a flat declarative
statement. For example, when the boy
seems to see some strange animals crawling through the forest, the narrator
simply says: "They were men." When the boy sees men lying in the
water as if without heads, the narrator simply says: "They were
drowned."
This
narrator is not named in the story, but is presented as a disembodied presence
who not only sees what the boy sees, but also sees the boy and draws
conclusions about the boy's responses. The boy's mind is as inaccessible to him
as it is to the reader. This technique
enables the reader to respond both to the boy's point of view and to the adult
teller. As the narrator says about the scene witnessed by the boy, "not
all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder
observer."
And
indeed it is the elder observer who establishes the ironic tone at the
beginning of the story which mocks the warrior-fire, the heroic race, and the
notion of a spirit of battle in the boy which make him born to "war and
dominion as a heritage."
It is
the subtle tension between this adult point of view and the childish perception
of the boy that creates the story's impact and reflects its theme. At one point in the story when the boy
(because of his deafness) sleeps through the battle that rages nearby, the
adult narrator says he was as "heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as
the dead who had died to make the glory."
Because
of this structural counterpoint the narrator has no need to make any more
explicit comment on the action. For the
juxtaposition of the two perspectives creates a tragic irony of war as
something more than an heroic and childish game, even as it makes us see how
war depends on just such a childish point of view to persist.
A
film version of this story, part of a trilogy of Bierce stories by French
director Robert Enrico, begins with pictures of fighters behind the opening
credits. The film is eerily silent, with grotesque images of men crawling
across the ground as the camera pans the area disclosing more and more wounded
and silent soldiers. Visual images in
the film are not as violent and graphic as those described in Bierce's story;
however, the anti-war theme is stronger in the film than in the story because
of the stark juxtaposition of images of childlike "playing at war"
and adult reality.
Tomorrow:Chekhov's
"Grief" (also translated as "Lament" and "Misery")
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