Chickamauga

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1984

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Character Analysis

Story Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Irony

There is considerable irony in this story, although of a dark and ghoulish kind. The irony can be seen in both the tone and the situation of the story. At the story’s beginning, for example, there is an obvious intended ironic contrast between the boy’s play-fighting and the solemn and commemorative way in which this imaginary fighting is described: “But the intrepid victor was not to be baffled; the spirit of the race which had passed the great sea burned unconquerable in that small breast and would not be denied” (Paragraph 2). The inflatedness of this language is later ironically undermined by the boy’s being frightened by a rabbit: a creature as helpless as he is.

These small ironies pave the way for the darker irony at the heart of the story. This is that the boy, in setting out on an imaginary heroic quest, only ends up lost and helpless; the greater part of his quest involves finding his way back home, which he then finds that he has participated in destroying. The story further suggests that this irony is not unique to the boy’s situation, but is at the root of war in general.

Surrealism

In this story there is an element of the surreal, which grows out of its wartime setting, and is also a function of the child’s confused and partial understanding of his surroundings. This surrealism is most especially seen in the depiction of the wounded soldiers, making their way through the woods. The child initially does not understand these soldiers to be human, and even once he realizes that they are men, does not understand how helpless they are. He takes their crawling on all fours to be playfulness, and the blood on their faces to be clownish paint. While the adult reader understands the child to be delusional, there is also a way in which we empathize with his delusions. What he is seeing is too devastating to be explained in any rational way; it is beyond rational understanding. While his response to it might be factually wrong, it is also emotionally appropriate.

Third-Person Narration

While this story has a limited omniscient point of view—one that mainly encompasses the consciousness of its boy hero—its point of view is not exactly a neutral one. We see the events of the story through the boy’s eyes, but we also see the boy through the eyes of what seems a very caustic and opinionated narrator. At the beginning of the story, we are told what to think of this boy and the world that he has inherited, and are encouraged to see him, despite his evident helplessness, from a certain skeptical distance: “It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure; for this child’s spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest […]” (Paragraph 1).

This distance somehow makes the later events of the story more horrifying, rather than less. We see them through the helpless, credulous eyes of the boy as well as, and the sardonic and pitiless eyes of the narrator. At the same time, we perceive the distance between these two points of view. Even before the boy has begun his doomed quest, there is a way in which he already seems trapped and doomed by his battle-mongering past. While he is just an individual to himself, the narrator is viewing him from a distance of several generations, as an expression of a violent and bloodthirsty lineage. The reader understands both of these perspectives equally—the first one viscerally and the other one intellectually—and sees the tragedy of an individual being unable to escape his destiny.