The initial judgment of “Horseman in the Sky” by reviewers at the time were among the harshest in Bierce’s career. The story had two strikes against it before it even came up to bat. Stories about the Civil War were supposed to be realistic. Adding to this already built-in conceptualization of Civil War stories was the rising supremacy of realism and naturalism in American literature. So, basically, Bierce was unleashing upon an unsuspecting public a war story that defied strict rules of realism and which included unnaturalistic elements like visions of flying horses. Complicating matters further is that the first of the story’s four sections lays a foundation that could be called the definition of naturalism. The next three sections then proceed to undermine the expectations of a realistic war story.
Perhaps it is not surprising that critics at the time completely missed the point. As one critics asserts in a review of Bierce’s collection of war stories, “Horseman in the Sky” is “the worst in the book so far as illusion is concerned.” The almost delicious irony here is that Bierce’s story is precise about the illusions of the Civil War which had taken hold among Americans in the quarter-century between the end of the war and the publication of the story. By avoiding the trappings of “realism” as critics like the above saw it, Bierce actually wrote an extremely realistic allegory of how that perspective had changed over the decades. Having actually served in the Civil War, he was more than experienced enough to know the real story and more than talented enough to present that story in literary form. After all, he’d done so many times before. In his other stories about the war, Bierce was writing about the war from that perspective. “Horseman in the Sky” is about the Civil War from a perspective of the future. This would seem to be perhaps a little difficult to understand were it not for one single image in the story which is about as explicit as it gets:
“For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part.”
Anyone alive in America in 1889 would have recognized this reference to the plethora of statues in just about every city in a state which sent soldiers to fight on either side of the Civil War. (If anyone doubts this claim as being anything close to the truth, just do an internet search for such a statue in your hometown. Admittedly, those living in the south may get results for a statue no longer on display.) The number of statues of American military figures posed astride horses before the Civil War could likely be counted on one hand of three-fingered sloth. Therefore, the very idea that the young sentry officer who wakes up after falling asleep on guard duty to initially mistake an actual man sitting on an actual for a horse of the type he had almost certainly never seen before seems, well, unlikely.
This concerted intrusion of fantasy into the carefully cultivated and precisely detailed realistic foundation established by the topographical description which makes up almost the entirety of the first section of the story is not there merely for the sake of entertainment. The fact that the sentry/sniper experiences a strange moment of perceptual disruption that just so happens to resemble what the future of Civil War memorials to its fallen soldiers looks like takes the reader out of the realistic setting and it does so for a very specific purpose.
Rather than adding to what had already become a largesse of realistic portrayals of the war as it happened, Bierce writes an allegory that may well be the first entry into the canon of war stories that portray the battlefield from the perspective of the present looking back. Much to Bierce’s dismay, that perspective had become romanticized and mythologized, stripping the brutal reality of its authentic truth and replacing it with a sanitized revisionist aspect that turned the parts played by more than a few inglorious bastards into nine-story-tall heroes carved in stone.
