Reality vs. Imagination Theme Analysis

The six-year old, deaf-mute protagonist of “Chickamauga” is often unaware of what is truly happening around him, creating an ironic distance between how the protagonist perceives the events of the story and how the narrator and the reader perceive those same events. This ironic distance works to amplify the story’s themes; the protagonists’ obvious misunderstanding about the reality of what’s going make the reader’s understanding of that reality even stronger. At the same time, while the child’s imaginative fantasies are extreme—in large part because the boy is not only six years old but also deaf and mute, thus locking him into his own world in a unique way—the story works to make clear that the boy is in many ways different in degree but not kind from other people. That is, the story makes clear that the boy is joined by the rest of humanity in seeing the world through fantasy and imagination rather than seeing the true reality, and that such ways of seeing the world in the end lead to disaster.

Throughout the story, the narrator knows more than the child, and chooses to disclose certain details to the reader that the protagonist is not aware of. Some of those details are about the battle of Chickamuaga itself, which took place while the child was asleep, and others are details about the horrific wounds the soldiers are left with as they attempt to crawl to a stream to drink water. The narrator notes that thousands of soldiers participated in the battle, that the forest is littered with broken weapons and supplies, and that many of the soldiers are already dead. However, “not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer.” Presumably almost anyone reading the story would be an “elder” of this six-year-old child, and so the narrator in this way calls out for the reader to notice these horrific details.

While the narrator calls out details of the battle to the reader, the narrator also deliberately conceals details about the child from the reader. Most importantly, the narrator does not reveal that the child is deaf and mute until the very end, when the child utters “inarticulate cries” upon discovering his mother’s dead body. The lack of clarity regarding the child’s behavior leads the reader, throughout the majority of the story, to find the child’s inability to understand the reality around him as astonishing or shocking. The revelation that the child is deaf and mute at the end of the story explains why he was able to sleep through a battle between thousands of men, why he never speaks to the soldiers, and why his cries for his mother when he saw the terrifying rabbit were “inarticulate” just like his cries at the end of the story. But the feeling that the story creates—of the horrific disconnect between the child’s understanding of war versus its reality—lingers on even after the story “explains” the child’s unique situation. 

Ultimately, the story uses the child’s naivete and inability to recognize the horror of war as a way to implicate everyone else who also do the same thing. The child, after all, has an excuse: he’s six, deaf, and mute. But the child’s father, who valorizes war and passed on these ideas to his child, is no such thing. Further, the narrator explains how the “child’s spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest…born to war and dominion as a heritage.” All of this suggests that the child’s glorified view of war as glorious and adventurous is an idea he inherited from his family and his society. Further, the narrator’s comment that “elder observers” would notice the details that the child missed can be read as ironic. After all, adult commanders sent those soldiers to fight and die. People not at the battle might remark on the casualties but will never truly understand the horror of them. The story, then, provides a vision of the horror of war that most of its readers will not have noticed, at least until reading the story. And any shock at the naivete of the child, therefore, must be accompanied by shock at the way that everyone’s imagination and fantasies work to block them from seeing reality. And in the story of the child—who ends up participating in a battle he doesn’t understand only to discover that the battle has destroyed his home and killed his family—the story makes clear that reality can be misunderstood, but it can’t in the end be denied.