A Boy's Childhood In Chickamauga By Ambrose Bierce

The normal six-year-old spends the majority of his or her day playing, reading, and all around enjoying life. However, growing up and learning about the world’s problems happens at some point in every child’s merry life; though, it rarely occurs when the child only lived for six years, which happened to the boy in the story “Chickamauga,” written by Ambrose Bierce. “Chickamauga,” written in 1891, is a classic coming-of-age short story that focuses on a young, mute, deaf Southern boy on a day he loses himself in the forest near his home. He stumbles across many creatures he has never encountered before, which occasionally frighten him, and other times fill him with delight. However, the young boy’s childhood deserted him as he discovered that
The boy stumbled upon the innocent rabbit early on in the story. “...he suddenly found himself confronted with a new and more formidable enemy: in the path that he was following, sat, bolt upright, with ears erect and paws suspended before it, a rabbit!” When the boy encountered the rabbit, something that had no motive to harm him, he ran away in terror. The boy truly feared what he had no knowledge of. The rabbit, who simply twitched its ear, scared the boy because of its ears. The deaf boy had no knowledge of what ears did, so it frightened him. However, the boy saw soldiers in his picture books, his only window to the terrifying world, and they did not scare him. The rabbit never appeared in his books, nor did the ears that frightened the boy so much, so the rabbit scared the boy. Through the rabbit, namely its ears, the boy’s fear of the unknown was
For example, the soldiers the boy encountered did not scare him, as he had seen them in picture books that his father showed him. “He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride.” The boy, having seen the soldiers in books but not real life, did not know about their suffering and the tragedy they put themselves through for their country. When the boy encountered the wounded, dying soldiers, he chose to play with them, not knowing how injured they were, which Bierce wrote in the story as “To him it was a merry spectacle.” The soldiers likely cursed at him, though the boy did not know their distaste for him as he could not hear their words because of his deafness. Later, when the boy saw the burning home, he felt excitement first, not knowing the intensity of the flames. “He cared nothing for that; the spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames.” He did not hear any of the cries of pain or the gunshots that caused the disaster, leaving him unknowing of what caused the horrid disaster. Because of his inability to hear, the boy’s deafness left him ignorant and