Fantasy of War vs. Reality of War Theme Analysis

In “Chickamauga,” a six-year old, deaf-mute child wanders into the forest to play at war. He gets lost, falls asleep, and then wakes up to find himself in the awful aftermath of a Civil War battle. However, through most of the story, the boy doesn’t understand the horrors he is witnessing. Instead, he delights in the spectacle, even pretending to be the maimed soldiers’ leader. The juxtaposition between the way the uncomprehending boy perceives war and how the story’s narrator and reader perceive the battle, coupled with the boy’s final awful realization that this battle has destroyed his home and killed his family, has two affects. First, it amplifies the pure horror of war; the boy’s inability to perceive that horror makes it all the more obvious to the reader. Second, it condemns the boy’s idea—and all those who share that idea—of war as being heroic and exciting as not just naïve but complicit in promoting war and all its brutal destruction.

The story quickly establishes that the boy believes war to be exciting and glorious. Just as importantly, though, the story also makes clear that the boy’s view is not unique to him, or to little boys. Rather, the story shows how such simplistic views of war are widespread among adults as well. The child begins the story by wandering into the forest with a toy sword, suggesting that he thinks of weapons as toys and battles as games. He pretends to be a soldier, fighting “invisible foes.” When the boy gets lost in the woods, he cries himself to sleep, while comforting himself with his toy sword which he sees as his “companion.” The capacity to commit violence gives the boy comfort. When the boy wakes up and finds himself surrounded by wounded soldiers (he slept through the Civil War battle of Chickamauga because of his deafness), he regards them as “a merry spectacle,” moving among them freely and riding them like horses. He “placed himself in the lead, his wooden sword still in hand, and solemnly directed the march...” The child views the wounded soldiers as fun playmates, not as casualties in a devastating battle. Crucially, the story explains the origin of the boy’s ideas about war. The boy’s father was once a soldier, and “in the peaceful life of a planter the warrior-fire survived,” such that the father loved “military books and pictures.” The boy learned his ideas about war from his father. The story, then, makes it impossible to simply dismiss the boy’s views as a result of being six years old, deaf, or mute. By connecting the boy’s ideas to his father’s ideas, the story indicates that such ideas are inherited from family and society—and makes clear that these ideas of war as being simple, heroic, and glorious are widespread.

The story then uses a variety of methods to poke increasingly larger holes in the boy’s—and society’s—simplistic ideas about war. One way the story does this is through style. The story describes the child’s war-play in the forest in language that is flowery and intense: at one point it describes the boy’s toy sword as “the weapon he bore bravely, as became the son of an heroic race.” This language is so flowery and intense, in fact, that it is best described as mock-heroic: its intensity is meant to hint that it, and the ideas of the boy it describes, should not be taken seriously.

The narrator also makes the juxtaposition between the boy’s understanding and an adult understanding more explicit. The narrator describes soldiers who are “maimed and bleeding,” and mentions that some are so wounded that they drown when they try to drink water. The narrator then states that  “not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer.” Through tone and detail the story and its narrator build an ironic rift between what the child perceives and what the narrator and the reader both perceive, heightening the tension between the child’s fantasy of war—a fantasy that the story has made clear is held by many who are not children at all—and its actual brutal reality.

In addition to using its style, the story also shows the dangerous and tragic foolishness of the boy’s views through the events of the story. After “leading” the army of wounded soldiers, the boy sees a fire: “the spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames.” The reaction to violent destruction here is typical for the child: he’s excited by it, just as the story makes clear his father was excited by fighting and defeating “savages” many years earlier.  Soon after, however, the boy discovers that the fire has destroyed his home and that his family has been killed. The implication is that the devastation of battle spun out beyond just the battle, and resulted in destruction of civilians as well. In this moment the story also makes clear that the destruction of war isn’t ever contained by war—it isn’t limited to the soldiers or armies involved. Instead, it spins out of control, resulting in destruction to those like the boy’s family not even taking active part. The destruction that excited the boy now devastates him and the boy’s naïve fantasies of war are punctured. The mock-heroic language describing those original fantasies gives way to the boy’s “inarticulate and indescribable cries” as he looks down at the body of his dead mother.

The boy’s journey—from playing at the fantasy of war, to reveling in destruction, to despair at the actual, brutal, uncontrollable outcomes of war—demonstrates just how ridiculous and tragic those original fantasies were. By tying the boy’s simplistic fantasies about war to those of the broader culture, and showing how the boy’s journey led to the loss of everything he had, the story takes aim at society and humanity more generally, and implies that the simplistic glorification of war will only ever lead to tragedy and self-destruction.