Chickamauga

One notable aspect of this story is its use of language. The story uses very different tonal registers at different various times. At the story’s opening, for instance—when the omniscient narrator is describing the boy and his love for all things military—the tone is elevated and mock-heroic. This creates an effect of distancing irony, similar to the distance that the boy himself feels from the destructive, gruesome aspects of war. The boy, who has been schooled by his father to idealize war and fighting, is fascinated by military strategies and by stories of conquering and heroism; he does not yet feel touched by the devastation that war leaves behind. While we are told that the boy has fighting in his blood, there is also a suggestion that the high rhetoric of the story’s opening is the same rhetoric that is often used to justify fighting and carnage. The language in the opening is both so weighty and so abstract—“From the cradle of its race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a great sea had penetrated a third[…]” (Paragraph 1)—that the reader senses an unwieldiness to it (Paragraph 1). There Is also the sense that this mood of somber grandiosity will be punctured, and it is. 

The lofty language of the story’s opening is very different from plain-spoken statements such as: “They were men” and “He was dead” (Paragraph 6). These latter statements sound almost childish in their directness and simplicity, and it is an irony that the boy does not understand the import of them; rather, it is the pontificating, elaborately adult-sounding language of the story’s opening that is also the narrating voice in his head, as he goes on his imaginary heroic quest. Even as his quest becomes increasingly more gruesome and populated—and he finds himself at the head of a troop of live, wounded soldiers—the boy still retreats from the bluntness of what he sees. Even though he is frightened personally by some of the soldiers, he is not horrified by their condition. He looks past the blood in the creek and the lifeless bodies in it—“They were drowned” (Paragraph 9)—and holds tightly to his role as imaginary general of the troop: “He waved his cap for their encouragement and smilingly pointed with his weapon in the direction of the guiding light—a pillar of fire to this strange exodus” (Paragraph 9).

There is also another tonal register in this story, one that is in between the high rhetoric of the boy’s imagination and the stripped-down horror of what is in front of him. This is when the omniscient narrator seems to address us directly, as when he states, of the boy and the troop of wounded and dismembered soldiers: “Surely such a leader never before had such a following” (Paragraph 7). While this is meant wryly, the story also suggests that the boy’s perspective is only an exaggerated and guileless version of the perspective of many adult generals; he is so concerned with being a leader that he does not notice the condition of his followers. The story also suggests that the boy’s perspective, though childish and distorted, is also a strangely appropriate one: the imaginary world in his head is equal to the unreality of what he sees. His failure to understand that the soldiers are men, and then to understand just how wounded they are, somehow emphasizes the surreal and dehumanizing horror of their situation in a way that a savvier and more adult perspective could not. We see the soldiers through his eyes, as inexplicable half-animals crawling through the woods at night.

At the end of the story, upon discovering his mother’s body, the boy is left wordless, and can only make animal sounds himself. We have been told earlier that “his military career was at an end,” (Paragraph 10), and now his military rhetoric has also deserted him (paragraph 10). The story suggests that war often begins with a lot of inflated language, but ends with no language at all.