Beyond Realism: The Grotesque Images in Ambrose Bierce’s War Stories

Abstract

Ambrose Bierce’s military experiences as a Union soldier in the American Civil War make him create the original and unique war stories which cannot be easily found in the works of other contemporary writers. Many literary critics have regarded Bierce as a writer of the greatest wits and the most uncompromising satirist among nineteenth century American writers. Throughout his entire life, Bierce continuously endeavors to present more psychological struggles and the harsh realities of combat beyond realism to his readers in the form of short stories. Significantly, Bierce rejects to represent his tales as the traditional, inherited rhetoric romanticizing the Civil War. A number of his war stories strikingly feature the horrible, bizarre, terrible, ghastly, repulsive, mysterious and surrealistic elements which can be summed up as the grotesque. Furthermore, some of his war stories such as “The Major's Tale” and “Chickamauga” have the burlesque and the comic elements. Consequently, we could not help laughing by the “practical joke” of the soldiers to tease Lieutenant Haberton and the little boy’s playing soldiers as a commander for the crawling soldiers respectively. “The Major's Tale” and “Chickamauga” are well suited to Bakhtin’s grotesque as he sees “the burlesque, the comic” as the “essence and the driving force” of the grotesque. Particularly, “Chickamauga” provides plenty of inspiration for film directors, transcending the bounds of periods and genres. Bierce’s war stories remarkably disclose the estranged world of the grotesque in which the ambivalence of life and death, innocence and experience, horror and laughter exist, going beyond a mere realistic representation. Inspired by Bierce’s war stories, a French film director Robert Enrico made a superb short film entitled Chickamauga in 1962. This film is worthwhile to note because it strikingly transforms Bierce’s estranged world of the grotesque into the excellent visual representation. Undoubtedly, it is the grotesque that becomes the source of Bierce’s creative imagination.