20 pages • 40 minutes read
Ambrose BierceChickamauga
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Fire
The boy has a complex reaction to the fire in this story. He is initially drawn towards it, the story suggests, simply because it is a change from the darkness surrounding him; he does not consider that this change might not be for the better. In his confusion and fearfulness, he has returned to a primitive state, and there is something atavistic about his attraction towards the fire, as a source of light and warmth. It is possible that even the wounded soldiers— none of whom object to the march towards the fire— feel some of this attraction as well.
At the same time that the fire symbolizes warmth and light to the boy, however, it also symbolizes the very destructiveness that he has been trying to escape. We never learn how the fire was started, but it seems clear that it is a weapon of war. The boy is attracted to this destructive aspect of the fire as well; there is something exhilarating to him about its complete wildness: “[T]he spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames” (Paragraph 10). Ultimately, the fire absorbs and entraps the boy in much the same way that war and the culture of fighting does; he looks to it for both danger and consolation, as with a spiraling addiction.
Wooden Sword
The boy’s wooden sword is more of a prop than a weapon, and serves less to fend of danger than to lead him further into it. It is partly because the boy is so caught up in the play of battle that he ends up lost in the woods at night; in this situation, the sword is no help to him at all. Yet he still clings to it in his sleep, as if it were something in between a weapon and a security blanket: “[H]e lay down in a narrow space between two rocks, within a few yards of the stream and still grasping his toy sword, no longer a weapon but a companion, sobbed himself to sleep” (Paragraph 3).
The sword is an obvious symbol for the earliness with which the culture of fighting takes root in boys, and also for the ways in which this culture strands and fails boys and men. It is significant that at the end of the story, the boy throws his sword into the fire that—as he will soon learn—has just destroyed his home. It is an act of both supplication and defeat: he is literally fanning the flames of war, and is at the same time throwing away his weapon.
The Woods
The woods in this story are a sheltering element, but are also a kind of maze. The boy becomes lost in the woods after playing at war, while the soldiers later retreat to the woods after their actual fighting. In ways both comforting and disconcerting, the woods are a realm in which the rules of war do not apply. This means, on the one hand, that the soldiers and the boy are relatively safe while they are in the woods; on the other hand, it means that they are without a map. Their safety means nothing to them if they do not know where they are or how to proceed.
The woods therefore illustrate how dependent these characters are on the codes of war, to the point where they mistrust the natural world, which is indifferent to these codes. It is significant that the boy falls asleep in the woods, soothed by the gentle sounds of birds and squirrels, while failing to hear the sounds of the nearby battle:
“The wood birds sang merrily above his head; the squirrels, whisking their bravery of tail, ran barking from tree to tree […] and somewhere far away was a strange, muffled thunder, as if the partridges were drumming in celebration of nature’s victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers” (Paragraph 3).
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By Ambrose Bierce
