The Title
The heavy and pervasive irony which permeates this story begins at the top. The Battle of Chickamauga is one of the most famous of the Civil War—the first in Georgia, a major defeat for the Union and behind only Gettysburg in terms of lives lost. “Chickamauga” carries absolutely no connotation for the reader capable of providing them with insight into just how unusually disturbing this “war story” turns out to be. Bierce was as famous for his stories of the supernatural as he was for his war stories—if not as highly regarded—and this story at times seems as though it could just as appropriately into a collection of that genre as it does into his collection of Civil War battle stories. The utter banality of the title is in ironic juxtaposition to the absolute macabre narrative within.
The Rabbit
One of the most macabre examples of irony in the story is that the small boy at its center finds himself on the battlefield of Chickamauga surrounded by dead and dying and gruesomely disfigured soldiers while the red glare of rockets light up the sky and the slow procession from noble glory to inglorious death plays out before him. Despite all this, until the shocking revelation at the story’s end, the one and only thing that absolutely terrifies the boy beyond all reason is the sudden appearance of a rabbit sitting upright with his long ears fully extended.
Death and Glory
The entire story is constructed from an ironic tension between the glorified ideal of warfare and the ugly business of actually fighting wars. Imagery presenting soldiers as mythic warriors has informed the ideal for the young boy through the mediation of his father which has been distilled down into the reality of children’s game with a toy wooden sword. The young boy plays out a delirious fantasy of war disconnected in every way—including emotionally—from the reality of soldiers dying on the actual battlefield. The ironic distance underlines the fact that this is a brutally anti-war story that calls into question every existing story which denies the reality of battle in order to portray it as fantasy idealization.
The Anti-Fairy Tale
The story contains certain aspects similar to those of fairy tales. A small child wanders away from home—a quick reference is made that those back home are frantically searching for him—and into a strange, surreal world that is both familiar and unfamiliar at once. While he enjoys himself, the narrator makes clear that this is place for a child as it is fraught with danger and poses constant threats to his very existence. The world here is monstrous even though it lacks monsters and the adventure inexorably leads the boy back to his home. In a fairy tale, of course, this would mean a happy ending with home representing safe sanctuary from the nightmare of the world outside. Here, however, the happy ending is tragically inverted as it becomes the place where the boy finally comes to understand the reality of the horrors he has been able to transform into fantasy. Whereas leaving home and going into the forest is where most children in fairy tales come face to face with the darkness of maturity, in this story the forest represents childhood innocence and home is where the ugliness of reality finally must be confronted.
The Twist
Ambrose Bierce’s most famous short story—indeed, one of the most short stories in American literary history—famously ends with a shocking and quite jarring twist. “An Occurrence at Ow Creek Bridge” purports to tell the amazing story of how a prisoner of war escapes death and makes his way to freedom when the rope with which he is being executed by hanging snaps at the last second, sending him crashing through the waves below. After an exhilarating race to escape his pursuers, he makes it back to home and into the arms of his wife only to collapse in an apparent stroke. The final line, however, indicates that everything which has transpired all occurred in the prisoner’s mind in that flash of a second between his fall from the gallows and the onset of death. Everything was just a wonderful dream occurring at the very instance of death.
Likewise, this story also ends on a twist, but the revelation of important knowledge held back from the reader until now is not really the twist. Just before the story concludes—almost the very last last—the narrator tersely explains that the boy is deaf and mute. That is less a twist, however, than a delayed acknowledgement of fact. The real twist here is that the nightmarish scenes of a young boy treating a bloody battlefield covered with dying soldiers like a playground where his imagination could be fully unleashed turns out not to have been a dream or a vision or a fantasy, but a description of reality. The most brutal twist of “Chickamauga” is that it ends without a twist that helps explain the ghastly disconnect between the emotional reaction of the child and the emotional reaction of the reader to what both are bearing witness.
