Once a week, the
Library of America sends subscribers to its website a “Story of the Week.” This week, the story is Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,”
a tightly controlled fiction with a meaningful trick at the end. I discussed the story with my students many
times over the years and included it in my textbook Fiction’s Many Worlds. Here
are some of the discoveries I made about the story with the help of my
students.
This is the Library of America’s headnote for the story:
“Armed with a toy sword, a little boy treks through the forest and
fights off imaginary enemies—not realizing that, nearby, a very real battle was
being waged.”
Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga
The
anti-war theme of Bierce's story 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
indeed 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.
