Theme and the Elements of Fiction Essay

Chickamauga

Introduction

Ambrose Bierce's Chickamauga is a disillusioned child's awakening. Literally, a six year old deaf boy is thrown into a most horrifically traumatic series of events. His story is relayed in the third person omniscient perspective through the eyes of the child as well as an elder. It takes place during the Civil War in a southern town. Chickamauga begins with the boy's entrance into the forest where he goes to play solitarily.

Discussion

The six year old enters the forest as an innocent child with no experience in reality. All of his days until this one have been a candy coated fantasy. The reader gets a real sense of his naivety when he encounters a rabbit and is terrified. Maybe the child has never seen a rabbit before, or maybe he has seen one viewed in a dark light (Bierce, 35). All facts of this boy's life until this fateful journey into the woods have been given to him. The knowledge he possessed was second hand; it seems as though he'd never experienced anything himself. His father had delivered all of the information the boy held through books, which ironically glorified war. This child's tragic encounter with war was so foreign and inconceivable to him that when it so brutally hit him he doesn't even realize it.

The woods in Chickamauga symbolize the cruelty of reality. At his entrance into the forest, this completely innocent six year old begins his journey towards the horrors that await him. When the boy is in the forest he cries himself asleep, terrified of the new and unfamiliar paths he's traveled. While he's asleep a battle occurs and his house is set on fire. However the child is deaf so he does not hear what is going on. Finally he wakes ...