A Horseman in the Sky Literary Elements

War fiction, short story

A mountain cliff and valley in western Virginia at the beginning of the American Civil War, autumn 1861.

Third-person objective narrator with omniscient capability to enter into the thoughts of some characters.

This story is characterized by significant tonal shifts that have the consequence of altering the mood depending on what is taking place at the time. The entire section (Part I) is realistically descriptive as it situates a topographical tactic as part of an overall military strategy by one side to launch a surprise ambush on the other. From their the tone becoming gradually but increasingly ironic and the mood shifts wildly from wistful recollection of family disagreement to apocalyptic mysticism.

The protagonist of the story is clearly situated as Carter Druse. The antagonist is a bit murkier in that one might identify this role with Carter’s father just as easily as one might identify Carter himself as the antagonist against which he conducts an internal war over doing the right thing.

The major conflict taking place in this story is, of course, a no-brainer: that existing between the Union and the Confederacy in the American Civil War. That larger conflict is portrayed in microcosm through the relationship of Carter Druse and his father fighting for the North and South respectively.

The climax occurs does not occur until the next-to-last paragraph of the story when Carter Druse reveals the identity of the man sitting astride a horse on a cliff across the valley that he shot and killed.

The revelation that the man on the horse on the cliff across the valley is Carter’s own father has the capacity to shock, but is nevertheless subtly foreshadowed. A flashback to Carter announcing he is going against his father and state by enlisting with the Union includes the last words his father spoke to him, which include, “Whatever may occur, do what you conceive to be your duty.” Later this same exactly phrase will be repeated as Carter once again trains the scope of his rifle on the soldier on the horse. Additionally, the concept of duty is a recurring one in which the word itself appears half a dozen times throughout the text.

The revelation of the identity of the horseman that Carter shot and killed is the story’s primal example of emotional understatement, consisting of just two words: “My father.”

This story includes a very unusual example of how an author may use the literary device allusion. At one point, while looking at the horseman through the scope of his rifle, Carter experiences 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.” The author here is actually alluding to the intensity erection of statues and memories honoring the Confederate cause; activity which would not commencing until several decades after the point in time in which the story is set. One can fairly judge that one of the very first Americans to critique Confederate monuments in public was Ambrose Bierce in this story with its allusion not to the past of its protagonist, but to his future.

The central use of imagery in the story is seen not through Carter Druse looking into the scope of his rifle, but rather another Union soldier entirely who happens to accidentally be in the wrong place at just the right time to see the consequences of Druse peering through that scope. Although written in a realistic style, it is one of those remarkably extreme tonal shifts that transforms the father of Carter Druse and his horse falling over a cliff into a mystical experience of almost hypnotic apocalyptic imagery: “Lifting his eyes to the dizzy altitude of its summit the officer saw an astonishing sight—a man on horseback riding down into the valley through the air!”

There is a bit of paradox at the beginning of the story which finds Carter Druse asleep on duty, the punishment for which is death. The paradox here is that being asleep on duty means one cannot do the job that is required and the punishment for that infraction is death which means that a soldier qualified for certain essential duties won’t be available to do them ever again. Perhaps it is not so much a paradox as an example of the paradoxical oxymoron “military intelligence.”

N/A

During the flashback to the parting words of Carter’s father, a very common example of metonymy as it relates to the Civil War is engaged. Carter’s father reluctantly accepts his son’s decision and but can’t resist throwing in a little burn which seems peculiar to those living in the Confederacy and their obsession with states’ rights than it does among those living in norther states: “Virginia, to which you are a traitor, must get on without you.” Virginia, this case, being a metonym that applies not to the actual topography within borders but the conception of the state as an idea shared by its residents.

The strange and inexplicable process of waking from sleep—of transcending from unconsciousness to consciousness within the link of an eye—is personified into a vague human form in a description of the moment when the sleeping sentinel introduced at the story’s opening suddenly awakes without any recognizable stimulus for doing so: “some invisible messenger of fate touched with unsealing finger the eyes of his consciousness—whispered into the ear of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever have spoken.”