Ambrose Bierce

A detailed Summary of Ambrose Bierce

The style and motives of Ambrose Gwinnet Bierce are those of a great intellect and cynic. Through his short stories, his views on war, death, religion, love, and for a twist, the supernatural are blatantly illustrated. His experiences in his own life evidently shaped his literary works, and the end of his life - as mysterious as it was - was fitting for such a man. Having no true formal education, other than that from his one-year stay at the Kentucky Military Institute, his writing shows remarkable intelligence and wit. Bierce enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, and "it is doubtful if any other experience in his life had as much influence upon him as did his military service," (Sowa, 1965). A great deal of his short stories were stories of soldiers and their experiences, but he also incorporated mysterious occurrences and supernatural events into these tales. The fact that Bierce's stories demonstrate his wealth of knowledge is rather odd, considering his upbringing and educational background. He mainly had to rely on his father's library for his education, but it seems obvious that he had a great intellectual potential anyway, which would have been - and was - developed no matter what. His lite

rary style is an amazing one that paints a perfect picture of the mood as well as the settings of his stories. He did not seem to exclude one detail as he wove the intricate web of each and every tale that he wrote. My introduction to Bierce was with the short story "Chickamauga," which tells of a young boy who experienced first-hand the horrors of battle during the Civil War. This tale is an incredibly gory one, full of detail about the soldiers' injuries. The lack of emotion that Bierce put in is effective considering the terrible things that this boy was seeing while he was lost in the woods. The most influential aspect of this story was the fact that this boy was a deaf mute, and until the end of the story, the reader does not know that - a common characteristic of Bierce's writing. The story could not have been written if the boy was able to hear because he would have known that there was a battle going on near him, and he would not have been able to sleep through it. Not knowing that a battle was going on made it such that he didn't know why these people were crawling through the woods. Of course, they were gravely injured and trying to get to safety. The young boy did not truly appreciate what had happened until he went home to find his home burned and his mother dead. An additional soldier tale that I read was "A Horseman in The Sky," telling of a young man shooting his father. It was written rather mystically, and again, the reader did not know that the horseman in the sky was the young man's father until the very end. I say that it was written mystically only because when the young man was seeing this horseman, he appeared to be flying through the air toward him, which gives the reader reason to believe that the young man was hallucinating or that he was delirious from battle. Bierce again left out the young man's emotion over shooting his father, who had joined the war fighting for the opposing side, the Union. Another soldier tale that I read, which was quite different, was "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." It was the story of a man who was being hanged by the Federacy, and he was to be hanged off of a bridge over Owl Creek. The man was a simple planter, and the reason that he was being hanged was rather ambiguous - he had offended the enemy in some way. The majority of the story tells how this mans, after dropping from the bridge, fell

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Approximate Word count = 1596
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English