Bierce
BierceBierce
Serving as a union soldier in the Civil War, Bierce
learned of war' s savageness, and how stupid and degrading
it was. His writing style can be contributed to his war
time experiences. His works are blunt, brutally realistic,
and his attacks on others in the San Francisco Examiner,
(American Authors 1600-1900 76) were nowhere near
politically correct. Bierce's short stories "often hinge on
an ironic surprising conclusion" (Contemporary Authors 48),
as in one of his better known works "An Occurrence At Owl
Creek Bridge", were the sudden death of a Confederate spy
catches us by surprise. A forerunner of the realist
movement, Ambrose Bierce's cynical views of live and human
existence gave him the nickname, "the wickedest
man in San Francisco" (Contemporary Authors 41).
Although often portrayed as a realist for his accounts
on the Civil War, "Bierce was not striving for documentary
realism, as he himself admitted"(Short Story Criticism 48).
Instead, Bierce was interested in manipulating the reader's
viewpoint. The perspective in which the story is written is
used to manipulate the reader's viewpoint, for example in
"Chickamauga", where a bloody battlefield is seen through
the eyes of a deaf child(Short Story Criticism 48), or in
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", where a man about to be
hanged for treason, dreams of his escape. Bierce's often
ironic twists leave the reader stunned. As noted by Alfred
Kazin, "There is invariably a sudden reversal, usually in a
few lines near the end, that takes the story away from the
reader, as it were, that overthrows his confidence in the
nature of what he has been reading, that indeed overthrows
his confidence" (Short Story Criticism 49). For all of
this, why is Bierce considered a realist? Bierce, unlike
any other short story author before him, was not romantic
with his war depictions. He painted in our mind, its
gruesomeness, its wastefulness. Bierce's stories depict
soldiers "as bewildered fools, doing things without sense,
submitting to torture and outrage without resistance, dying
at last like hogs"(Discovering Authors Mencken, H.L.).
Nonetheless, as stated by Clifton Fadiman, a literary
critic, "what he writes has the bitter-aloes taste of truth.
He helped blaze the trail for later and doubtless better
realists" (Discovering Authors Fadiman, Clifton).
Bierce's fascination, his focal point, in many of his
literary works is none other than death. One can even state
he was obsessed with it. From his gruesome descriptions of
human suffering and decay, to the ironic deaths of many of
his characters, death was...
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