Bierce's Short Stories example essay topic

"The Wickedest Man In San Francisco' Serving as a union soldier in the Civil War, Bierce learned of war's savageness, and how stupid and degrading it was. His writing style can be contributed to his war time experiences. His works are blunt, brutally realistic, and his attacks on others in the San Francisco Examiner, (American Authors 1600-1900 76) were nowhere near politically correct. Bierce's short stories "often hinge on an ironic surprising conclusion' (Contemporary Authors 48), as in one of his better known works "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge', were the sudden death of a Confederate spy catches us by surprise. A forerunner of the realist movement, Ambrose Bierce's cynical views of live and human existence gave him the nickname, "the wickedest man in San Francisco' (Contemporary Authors 41). Although often portrayed as a realist for his accounts on the Civil War, "Bierce was not striving for documentary realism, as he himself admitted' (Short Story Criticism 48).

Instead, Bierce was interested in manipulating the reader's viewpoint. The perspective in which the story is written is used to manipulate the reader's viewpoint, for example in "Chickamauga', where a bloody battlefield is seen through the eyes of a deaf child (Short Story Criticism 48), or in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', where a man about to be hanged for treason, dreams of his escape. Bierce's often ironic twists leave the reader stunned. As noted by Alfred Kaz in, "There is invariably a sudden reversal, usually in a few lines near the end, that takes the story away from the reader, as it were, that overthrows his confidence in the nature of what he has been reading, that indeed overthrows his confidence' (Short Story Criticism 49). For all of this, why is Bierce considered a realist? Bierce, unlike any other short story author before him, was not romantic with his war depictions.

He painted in our mind, its gruesomeness, its wastefulness. Bierce's stories depict soldiers "as bewildered fools, doing things without sense, submitting to torture and outrage without resistance, dying at last like hogs' (Discovering Authors Mencken, H.L. ). Nonetheless, as stated by Clifton Fadiman, a literary critic, "what he writes has the bitter-aloes taste of truth. He helped blaze the trail for later and doubtless better realists' (Discovering Authors Fadiman, Clifton). Bierce's fascination, his focal point, in many of his literary works is none other than death.

One can even state he was obsessed with it. From his gruesome descriptions of human suffering and decay, to the ironic deaths of many of his characters, death was his only constant. "Death was Bierce's favorite character' (Discovering Authors Wilson, Edmund), and often considered his only character. "In all Bierce's fiction, there are no men or women who are interesting as men or women – that is, by reason of their passions, their aspirations or their personalities. They figure only as the helpless butts of sadistic practical jokes, and their higher faculties are so little involved that they might almost as well be trapped animals.

' (Discovering Authors Wilson, Edmund) Bierce placed humans "somewhere between the sheep and the horned cattle', as stated by H.L. Mencken. "There was nothing of the milk of human kindness in old Ambrose; he did not get the nickname of Bitter Bierce for nothing. What delighted him most in this life was the spectacle of human cowardice and folly' (Discovering Authors Mencken, H.L. ). For all of this, why is Bierce remembered? This "pessimism machine' (Discovering Authors Fadiman, Clifton), whose works grew repetitive and dull with his continuous depictions of death and human suffering, had a special gift.

With, his use of irony, and his sometimes brilliant use of words, he was capable of getting a laugh or a smile out of the death or deterioration of one of his characters. As in two of his works "My Favorite Murder' and "Oil of Dog', Bierce was able to get a chuckle out of the passing of another. Another reason for Bierce's remembrance is for his transformation of the short story. As stated by H.E. Bates, "Bierce began to shorten the short story; he began to bring to it a sharper, more compressed method' (Short Story Criticism 49). Bierce who was often considered bitter, opened a door to a new type of writing. [Unlike most of the authors before his time, his works did not always feature an optimistic viewpoint.] From his wartime experiences Bierce gained a different perspective on war than earlier war writers, and is often labeled a realist for this.

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