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.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality vs. Imagination ThemeTracker
Reality vs. Imagination Quotes in Chickamauga
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! With a startled cry the child turned and fled, he knew not in what direction, calling with inarticulate cries for his mother, weeping, stumbling, his tender skin cruelly torn by brambles, his little heart beating hard with terror—breathless, blind with tears—lost in the forest!
Somewhere far off was a strange, muffled thunder, as if the partridges were drumming in celebration of nature’s victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers. And back at the little plantation, where white men and black were hastily searching the fields and hedges in alarm, a mother’s heart was breaking for her missing child.
Suddenly he saw before him a strange moving object which he took to be some large animal—a dog, a pig—he could not name it; perhaps it was a bear…But something in the form or movement of this object—something in the awkwardness of its approach—told him it was not a bear, and curiosity was stayed by fear. He stood still and as it came slowly on gained courage every moment, for he saw that at least it had not the long, menacing ears of the rabbit…Before it had approached near enough to resolve his doubts he saw that it was followed by another and another. To right and left were many more; the whole open space about him was alive with them—all moving toward the brook.
They were men. They crept upon their hands and knees
Not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer; he saw little but that these were men, yet crept like babes. Being men, they were not terrible, though unfamiliarly clad. He moved among them freely, going from one to another and peering into their faces with childish curiosity. All their faces were singularly white and many were streaked and gouted with red. Something in this—something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitudes and movements—reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them. But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it was a merry spectacle. He had seen his father’s negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement—had ridden them so, “making believe” they were horses. He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride.
An observer of better experience in the use of his eyes would have noticed that these footprints pointed in both directions; the ground had been twice passed over—in advance and in retreat. A few hours before, these desperate, stricken men, with their more fortunate and now distant comrades, had penetrated the forest in thousands. Their successive battalions, breaking into swarms and reforming in lines, had passed the child on every side—had almost trodden on him as he slept. The rustle and murmur of their march had not awakened him. Almost within a stone’s throw of where he lay they had fought a battle; but all unheard by him were the roar of the musketry, the shock of the cannon, “the thunder of the captains and the shouting.” He had slept through it all, grasping his little wooden sword with perhaps a tighter clutch in unconscious sympathy with his martial environment, but as heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory.
There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.
He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.
