Essay Questions

How does Bierce extend his dual narrative perspective beyond the actual narration?

Important to keep in mind is that “Chickamauga” is structured a dual narrative in which two distinctly different perspectives are working simultaneously. This concept is carried through by Bierce beyond the narrative device into the use of symbols. The toy sword of the child is thus endowed with two symbolic meanings at once: it is both a toy that speaks to the immaturity of the child wielding it while also working on a metaphorical level as commentary on the long literary tradition of glamorizing warfare by transforming the reality of weaponry into propaganda which infects the immature minds of youth eager to join the ranks and seek the glory of the warrior myth.

What is the significance of the strange episode with the rabbit?

The boy is surrounded by the gruesome reality of battle at its most primal, infantry-level, face-to-face combat in the form of the wounded soldiers crawling on the hands and knees and bellies. And yet he shows true, genuine terror only once: when he sees a rabbit sitting upright in the path before. This sight—quite literally the most benevolent image in the entire story—induces such horror in him that he runs screaming at such a high pitch of panic that the experience has the effect of lulling him into sleep. Contextually, then, the rabbit becomes one of the most important elements of the story when juxtaposed against the imagery that the reader expects the boy should find horrifying. His emotional responses are always at odds against that which would be expected; thus the rabbit becomes a metaphor of how emotional reaction to reality is often shaped by how one is taught to react. The boy fails to react properly to scenes of war because he has been taught that war is a glorious fantasy. By contrast, the rabbit is evidently something he has not yet been taught about and so appears as alien and, with its long ears, threatening.

How is the boy’s deaf/muteness thematically applicable to the genre of the war story?

The portrait of a young boy sleeping soundly while cannon fire explodes over him and soldiers stealthily seek out positions all around him becomes an intensely powerful symbol of how each successive generation of children are willingly made deaf to the reality of war by writers telling stories that only highlight the glory and refuse to demonstrate the ugly truth of the battlefield. Likewise, the child’s inability to articulate his experiences is symbolic of that absence in the stories of war. The child has experienced both the fantasy warrior myth and the ugly realities of warfare, but his strangled, garbled, incoherent cries of in the reality of an ability to speak symbolize how the truth about the battlefield is not a place a glory for most soldiers and how even those who are not soldiers become victims of that fantasy of glory remains silent in the hands of a literary history that refuses to be honest in its depiction. Unlike, for instance, the story being read which was, predictably, greeted with controversy over its brutality depiction of the battlefield.