Chickamauga

The child’s quest in this story can be seen as a kind of war in miniature. It begins, like many wars, with grand ideas about conquering and victory—ideas that are expressed in lofty, abstract language: “This weapon he now bore bravely, as became the son of an heroic race, and pausing now and again in the sunny space of the forest assumed, with some exaggeration, the postures of aggression and defense that he had been taught by the engraver’s art” (Paragraph 2). Also as with many wars, the child’s aim in going out in to the field is vague and sketchily thought out. He knows only that he wants to explore and conquer, and he feels entitled to do so because he has “war and dominion as a heritage” (Paragraph 1). This sense of entitlement arms him as much as does his home-made wooden sword.

The child’s quest soon becomes derailed by reality, however: first, the unexpected sight of a rabbit sends him into the woods, where he gets lost (and sleeps through an actual battle). Then, more seriously, the sight of wounded soldiers moving through the woods serves to turn the child back around towards home. In the guise of leading his troops, the boy makes his own sort of retreat; when he arrives home, he finds that there is nothing there anymore. It is a journey that is both absurd and horrifying, and that is above all senseless: the opposite of what a military adventure looks like on paper. The boy has not conquered new territory at all, but has simply redoubled back on his own territory. Far from being a decorated hero, he finds himself stranded and alone.

The dehumanizing aspects of war can be seen in the boy’s attitude towards the wounded soldiers. While the boy eventually identifies these soldiers as men, and therefore “not terrible,” (Paragraph 6), he nevertheless fails to see them as complete human beings (Paragraph 6). The sight of their wounds strikes him as clownish and strange, rather than horrifying. W; while he is momentarily frightened by one soldier who violently throws him off of his back, it is the soldier’s threatening raised hand that frightens him, as much as the soldier’s broken, bloody face. After briefly hiding behind a tree, he is urged by the sight of a fire in the distance to return to the head of the troop and reassume his role as imaginary general. Although the sight of decapitated bodies in a creek gives him pause, it does not stop him in his quest altogether.

The dead body of the boy’s mother is described in more exact and vivid detail than are the various dead bodies of the soldiers that the boy has already seen. The soldiers’ bodies have been described bluntly and tersely, in terms of the battlefield actions that have been done to them: they have been decapitated, or have lost an arm or a leg, or are simply bleeding copiously. These brief descriptions highlight the boy’s sense of them as casualties, and of their deaths as serving a higher cause and being a part of a coherent narrative, however disturbing and violent. On the contrary,However, his mother does not exist within this realm of men and fighting, and her death seems to have been for no reason. S; she is, moreover, the boy’s mother, and all that he is able to do is stare at her body, as if he can somehow find a clue to the destruction within the destruction itself: “The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with crimson bubbles—the work of a shell” (Paragraph 12). While this is a violent and gruesome image, it is also—compared to the previous images of violence in the story—a strangely delicate one. The “shell” and “bubbles” suggest fragility, as does the “frothy” exploded brain itself. Taken at the very end of the story, the image suggests that this intricate human fragility has more to teach us than does force and strength.