Sunday, December 1, 2019
Review of Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce Essay Example
Review of Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce Essay Perhaps no other writer in American history was more uniquely qualified to compose fiction about the American Civil War as Ambrose Bierce. Naturally disposed toward gritty realism adn journalistic observation,but given to flights of poetic ecstacy, Bierce served in the Civil War as a soldier, enlisting out of his home in Warsaw, Indiana, (Gale, 2001, p. 51) and wen on to attain the rank of Lieutenant by the wars close. Along the way, he faced combat, being trapped behind enemy lines, and whose unit which participated in the battle of Shiloh [] suffered the greatest number of casualties of all Union regiments involved on 6–7 April (Gale, 2001, p. 51). Bierce later wrote extensively about his experiences and the fiction he generated stands as some of the most interesting and innovative writing made during the early post-war years.The stories collected in Ambrose Bierces Civil War Stories were originally published in 1909 as part of the two volume set The Collecte d Works of Ambrose Bierce. The sixteen works of fiction collected in Civil War Stories span a range of genres from memoir, as in What I Saw of Shiloh, to allegory as in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, to what might be described as adventure/travelogue, as in Four Days in Dixie. The stories in the book are placed in what appears to be a random, but is most likely a thematic, order; however, there are no designations for one type of story as opposed to another, no sub-headings or section breaks. The stories are presented without editorial commentary or embellishment.          Unlike the facts-only historical writings that study the Civil War, Bierces writings are flavored with poetic description, biting sarcasm, colorful characters, and well-made plots. The conflicts of the large war are made at a personal level through his descriptive writings. In the case of a story like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge the death-knell of the South is prese nted as the death of a single man and the moral of the story is that to dream is sometimes to belive in a fallacy which will result in death.In other stories like What I Saw of Shiloh, the reader learns what it was like in a real Civil War battlefield, with grim and shocking descriptions of the battlefields and the dead. His description of a mortally wounded Federal sergeant is both grotesque and blackly humorous. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this his brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known that one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain. (Bierce, 1994, p. 10) The above quote shows how Bierce combined sarcasm with realistic detail in order to both horrify his readers and let them see certain realities of war which would contradict the glamorous attitudes that were often used to recruit soldiers and convince citizens to make war. Bierces themes in Civil War Sto ries often make use of pitting the fantasy of war against the reality of war.Using his life experience as a background enabled Bierce to create fiction that would ring as reality for the readers of his time and throughout to the present day. Perhaps no story better than his most famous Civil War story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge demonstrates that Bierce wanted to discourage the glamorization of war. However, all of the tales in Civil War Stories could be considered as showing the reality of war better than the fantasy of war. Where historical studies make use of statistics and dates, Ambrose Bierces fiction makes ample use of anecdotal evidence, and is often sheer fiction without even the pretext of being factually true. Instead, Bierce tries to express the essence of war through the immediate impact for better or worse on the individual person who experiences war. Also within the context of the lived-experience, Bierce is able to show the loss of innocence in a young person, as he does so well in Four Days in Dixie bit also the romanticization of youth and innocence even in the midst of the horrors of war, as he does in What I Saw of Shiloh.The humorous aspect of Bierces writings also gives the memoir and fictional visions of the Civil War an authentic, real-life feeling, reminding modern readers that the people who fought and died in the Civil War or had their lives completely upturned by the war were people and not just anonymous casualties. By personalizing the war, Bierce may be offering his readers the chance to decide for themselves just how romantic war is and whether or not participating in a war is morally or even logistically advisable. A shift in Bierces narrative tone also shows this same encroaching cynicism:It is interesting to compare Bierces description of Chickamauga, written in 1898, with his            account of Shiloh, which was begun as early as 1875 [] The trembling indignation , the           flashes of poetry, that make Shiloh a fine bit of writing, are absent from Chickamauga. In         the latter piece he merely set down the facts with yawning indifference. (McWilliams,        1929, p. 51)In A Horseman in the Sky Bierce offers one of the most climactic and sensational plot-twists in the book, which indicates just how hard it is to establish fiction from memoir in these stories. Of course the situation described in the story that a son would shoot his own father probably happened during the Civil War but Bierces version of it is certainly fictional and dramatized in order to leave the reader with a specific impact and meaning. The most illustrative aspect of Civil War Stories is not pictures, per se, but the dramatic mental images generated by Bierces writings. Most readers will walk away from Civil War Stories with a deeper and more immediate grasp of the Civil War as it impacted those who participated in it and were touched by it on a personal level. This provides an excellent counterpart to the big picture view that is gained by reading strictly non-fiction studies of the Civil War.
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