War Stories
The entire narrative of “Chickmauga” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the war story and the difficulty some veterans have in telling them and some writers have in writing them. The inarticulate quality of both the child and the soldier whose lower jaw is missing are metaphorical representations of the inability or incapacity for the horrors of the battlefield to be presented afterward as either verbal story or written document.
War Games
Another metaphorical aspect of the narrative running throughout its length is the portrayal of the horrors of war through the eyes of the little boy as a fantasy world filled with mimes, animals, a wooden sword as the weapon of the son of a war hero and civilized race to the South. All this imagery of war as a fantasy—a fun game that transforms the dead, mutilated bodies of men into horses to ride—is a metaphor for the way that adults transform war into a glorified fantasy in order to beat the drums that bring a new generation to the bloody fields that will become their ignoble graves.
“To him it was a merry spectacle.”
The image that the reader is presented is peppered with descriptive words and imagery like “gouted with red” and “maimed and bleeding men” and “ghastly gravity” and so it certainly jarring when the narrator informs the reader that to the child this is a portrait of a “merry spectacle.” This is an example of controlled narrative creating paradox and irony through the manipulation of tone. If told in the first person from the child’s perspective, there would be no emotional disconnect made obvious; the reader would see things exactly as a merry spectacle. If told strictly from narrative perspective that presents only facts and not insight into any character, the reader not see things through the child’s eyes. The choice of perspective is deliberate on the author’s part and vital for his purpose of creating the disconnect between what is going on the way the child interprets it.
Beetles
The soldiers are presented throughout in ways that remove them from their humanity, but perhaps the most fitting metaphor places them within the symbolic milieu of the collective:
“And so the clumsy multitude dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime--moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, with never a sound of going--in silence profound, absolute.”
Like beetles, they are close to the ground, stripped of the nobility of humanity, moving in lockstep with each other and appearing less as people than barely discernible shapes. Animal imagery is pervasive throughout the story; the men start out appearing as possibly dogs or even a bear. Finally, however, the devolve even further down the scale to become comparable to bugs barely rising out of the soil.
The Language of a Devil
The story ends with the revelation that the young boy’s disconnected emotional response to the violence taking place around him is partially due to his being deaf and mute; removed from the ability to hear the sounds of war, the sights of war also lose context. The final image of the story is that of the young boy reacting to the sight of his mother gruesomely victimized by soldiers and their shells as he struggles vainly to express a response, but instead is capable only of making
“a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”
In addition to the story as a whole being a metaphor for the inability to fully articulate a response to the horrors of war, this final image presents a literal display of the inability to communicate as a metaphor how the lack of an ability to communicate is analogous to a state of evil. For a writer, no world is more horrifying than a world in which communication becomes impossible and with this imagery Bierce communicates the full depravity of such a world through metaphor.
