Loss Of Innocence In Ambrose Bierce's Chickamauga

In the story Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce, a young boy goes through a journey that, while unique to him, leads to a loss of childlike innocence that happens to all of us. All too soon, however, the boy wanders to far from home and becomes lost. In his journey to get back to his familiar home he experiences a gradual loss of his childlike innocence, culminating in a total loss of childhood innocence when he realizes that the dead woman he has found is his mother. At the beginning of his journey the child resembles most of us in youth. This is seen at the beginning of the story when the young boy wanders away from home into the forest. “It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure ;”( Bierce) He is innocently playing a game of war which children have been doing throughout history. Most children when slipping away from parental control, especially at the age when they are just beginning to be both eager to explore and weary of adult constraints, feel the heady sense of freedom that this boy experiences. The child also exhibits the innocence of childhood in his total lack of awareness that

Time appears to have been disrupted and great changes have occurred while he slept. This is a very effective plot strategy playing upon both the reader’s and the boy’s disorientation. As stated by Gordon Berg in his article ‘A Tall Tale of Chickamauga’ Bierce used a radical disruption of chronological time to create a sense of unreality. (Berg) This is very effective in highlighting the strangeness of seeing “the whole open space about him” (Bierce) covered with men moving strangely through the forest. Rather than being alarmed at seeing men moving not using their arms or crawling because they are unable to walk the child wanders among them “peering into their faces with childish curiosity”.