Methods of Spoonfeeding: Realism and Romance in Huck Finn and Chickamauga

The romance in "Chickamauga" is easy to spot. A boy enamored with the glory and bloodlust of war, as taught to him by his ex-soldier father, a toy weapon, an imaginary battle, the blood of mighty warriors in his small, six-year-old breast. This continues undisturbed for four paragraphs and a sentence, and then the boy is startled by a rabbit in the woods, flees, and sobs himself to sleep in the forest. You're touched, then, by how young the boy is, how innocent. Very soon after this, the story takes a turn for the gruesome. The boy is confronted with a pack of crawling animals -- later determined to be men desperately wounded by battle.

The boy is so young that he doesn't realize the men are bleeding and broken, crawling towards the most basic relief in the world, and the last one that many of them probably will ever have -- water. Some die in the attempt, and others die with the success of plunging their heads into the river and not being able to get back out again. The boy tries to 'ride' on a man's back, and only when he's bucked off and faced with a man missing his jaw that he becomes afraid. Returning back to his home, he finds the mutilated body of his mother, and Bierce reveals that the boy is a deaf mute.

While the boy was embarking on his imaginary battle, a real one was taking place around him. The romance of war is quickly and cruelly flipped over to reveal the gory reality of it. Through the eyes of the child, war is at first a fascinating play, then an unimaginable terror. The purpose of the short story is to make a point quickly and efficiently, and unlike Twain, who weaves a tale of adventure and tucks satirical bits in between, Bierce is the kind of writer that goes straight for the emotional sucker punch, letting you know exactly what he's thinking and how he feels about it. Romanticizing war to children, in Bierce's view, is a dangerous and awful practice. There is no romance in war, only destruction and chaos. The innocence of the child is destroyed in the course of one day, and there's no getting that back for him. He will probably be on his own, as well, unless he finds someone kind enough to take on the care of a deaf mute child. Based on what I know from being a fan of Helen Keller, who was born twenty years after the Civil War, there were severe prejudices against people with disabilities. Usually, if they weren't kept at home, they were neglected, abused, or at the very least ridiculed.

Twain's Huck Finn isn't necessarily spoon-feeding Twain's comments and thoughts about his world, but he does combine romance and realism much more seamlessly, showing the skewed prejudices and hypocrisy of the American South through Huck's innocence. Bierce instead uses his child character's innocence as an emotional gripping point to make his comments about the horrors of war.

Personally I like Twain's method better, because to see the world through the eyes of a child -- an outsider child, at that -- is much more subtle, and therefore more interesting than Bierce's shock therapy.