One of the most impactful ways in which the experience of war is recreated for a civilian audience is through he illustration of the human body, with lived experience and relevant literature depicting war as an entity so powerful that it physically marks the trauma of soldiers. It was not until the Civil War that American veterans became symbolically representative of the war, and this was due in large part to the transformation of the human body by war: first as an object of murder and then as a place of traumatic story. Civil War veteran and writer Ambrose Bierce provides an illustration of this concept in its first American context in his 1889 short story, Chickamauga, which takes place during the historic battle of the same name (which Bierce witnessed and participated in). This particular work by Bierce is significant in that it specifically uses the human body as a means to create an authentic illustration of both the soldier and the Civil War veteran. I intend to prove this argument by providing relevant contextual information about Bierce, analyzing Chickamauga's body imagery in narrative order, and finally comparing his impact on the language of war and trauma to that of Stephen Crane, a non-veteran. The results of this examination will serve to reveal a substantial cultural relationship between the human body and American war narratives as they evolved from the context of Bierce's writing after the Civil War. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Bierce's position as a major figure in post-1865 literary culture is attributable to his willingness to write Civil War fiction while he was also a veteran (Kaufmann). What is worth emphasizing from this biographical information is the fact that Bierce illustrates his war experiences creatively and through fiction, rather than using the popular styles of memoirs or historical documentation . Bierce's contribution to the American war narrative is groundbreaking, not least because he used the language of creativity and the style of fiction to communicate his specific experiences of trauma to a civilian audience. His method of achieving this is characterized notably by images and descriptions of the human body, the very physical form that he had been trained to objectify, degrade, and ultimately destroy during his years of combat. Bierce uses the human body as a literary tool in his war stories, both for narrative purposes and to personally engage with his unspeakably painful past, in which he was a nationally recognized murderer of his countrymen. Additionally, a brief chronicle of veteran-civilian relations in the postwar era serves to culturally contextualize Bierce's artistic emphases. While the excessive brutality of the Civil War affected almost every American in one way or another, it was the former soldiers who were forever affected by the events they witnessed and the actions they took. participated. The distress and upheaval of the veterans was so transformative that an irreparable chasm opened between them and the civilian population. Physically, emotionally, and mentally, these two groups of people have been entirely and irrevocably separated based on a traumatic experience. Yet, as all artists seek to do, Bierce strove to create aliterary work which would establish the slightest bridge between these two groups of people, which would allow the civilian population to better understand the experience of the soldier and thus to maintain more appropriate relations with them. Using the body as a venue for storytelling is, in this context, a method of communicating the physical trauma of the veteran, so that it is even a little more experiential for all Americans, as opposed to the veteran group .a few. In terms of making the soldier's experience of war and physical transformation more understandable to all individuals, Chickamauga emerges as Bierce's most vital illustration of the Civil War. Published in 1889, Chickamauga's origins as a fictional short story stem from Bierce's participation and testimony in the Civil War. Battle of Chickamauga, one of many particularly bloody conflicts that Bierce would witness as a soldier. In an artistic blend of personal experience and universal innocence, the story centers on the thoughts and actions of a six-year-old boy. This particular affectation of the story's perspective reflects Bierce's intention that his traumatic memories of battle be understood specifically as a corruption of innocence, of which the child's immature body and mind are naturally emblematic. Yet Bierce imposes the mentality and spirituality of a noble imperialist ideology on the child's natural state of underdeveloped physique. The narrator says, “…the spirit of this child, in the bodies of his ancestors, had been trained for thousands of years to memorable feats of discovery and conquest” (Bierce). Chickamauga's protagonist is doomed from the moment he is introduced, and it is precisely because of a natural separation between his physical abilities as a child and his mental instincts to act as an adult who believes himself to be a conqueror. The boy's body is created as a representative entity of all young men who joined the military to "become" men, only to be metaphorically transformed into machines and considered useful only as long as they could kill other beings humans. Bierce thus uses body language to foreshadow the boy's upcoming objectification and dehumanization in the exercise of his duties. The next bodies described are those of the soldiers passing through the forest after participating in the historic Battle of Chickamauga. First described as missing half of their entire anatomy, the narrator describes one soldier in particular as having "...a face devoid of a lower jaw - from the upper teeth to the throat, there was a large red space lined with shreds of hanging flesh and bone fragments. The abnormal prominence of the nose, the absence of a chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a large bird of prey crimson in the throat and chest with the blood of its prey. Graphic images aside, Bierce's focus on the soldier's wounded mouth suggests that for this soldier, communication as a verbal action is definitely impossible. Bierce's illustration of the future veteran is entirely characterized by a future of physical and mental isolation from other humans, as well as a self-image based on the physical appearance of incompleteness. More than allowing and even encouraging his physical humiliation, the war made him an object of combat and a symbol of his savagery. His bodily humiliation is complete, and the war has thus ensured his dehumanized identity. This notion of war as a system built on dehumanization is then elaborated on a broader scale, this time applying bodily degradation to the military as bodies of broken individuals. In the soldiers' “terrible march towards the water”, wesays that these look like men fleeing from their hunters. Bierce's language about the soldier's actions (obtaining water like any other being) is arguably similar to the description of pigs being led to a trough, rather than men reviving and cleansing themselves. This interpretation is supported by their comparison with hunted prey, but Bierce distorts the metaphor by continuing to refer to the hunted beings as “men”. Once again, Bierce uses a reuse of language and style in order to produce the vision of an otherwise unknowable trauma. Bierce's experimentation with language to meet a contemporary need for personal testimony and public recognition proves once again to be an affective communication of war experiences. The penultimate description of a war-torn body is a reflection of the boy's murdered mother, who is described in the following passage: "There, clearly visible in the light of the fire, lay the corpse of a woman – white face turned upwards, hands raised.” outside and seized lots of grass, clothes disturbed, long black hair tangled and full of coagulated blood. Most of the forehead was torn off, and from the jagged hole protruded the brain, overflowing from the temple, a frothy mass of blood. gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles - the work of a shell. "The victimization of a beloved family member, especially an undeserving civilian, makes the horrifying depiction of the body more tragic than horrifying. It is an entirely new bodily experience compared to those encountered previously, not because of the violence but because of the personal consequences of this violence The implications of this scene are substantial, not least because they denote an uncivilized and morally dishonorable style of fighting, clearly unjustifiable by the standards of conduct in combat. The body becomes a place in which the reader draws comparisons with previous descriptions of soldiers, allowing Bierce to expose the hypocritical irony of a system that validates the murder of some and denounces that of others. , the story's earlier foreshadowing of the boy's transformation blossoms when he sees his mother's body, with the narrator now observing her in the following quote: "The child moved his little hands, gesturing wildly and uncertain. He uttered a series of inarticulate, indescribable cries – something between the chattering of a monkey and the gulping of a turkey – a startling sound, soulless and ungodly, the language of a devil. The child was deaf and mute.” Bierce ensures the circularity of the narrative by changing the boy's body as only war does: through the weakening of the physical being and a final act of humiliation toward the boy's sense of identity. The surprise revelation that the boy is deaf and mute conveys the impossibility of trauma in the narrative while symbolically communicating what every veteran of every war knows: war is best communicated through the silence of the experienced soldier. Comparisons of Chickamauga to that of Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage provides an interesting juxtaposition between the nature of war from the perspective of veterans and non-veterans. Like Bierce, Crane frequently uses irony to express the irrelevance of heroic action in a war environment. Additionally, the protagonist Henry Fleming also experiences his sense of dehumanization specifically through the notion of physical existence as mere attachment to a collective body of soldiers. An example of this belief is his insistence that he is "simply a part of a vast blue manifestation" (Crane), thus suggesting that Crane wanted an approach to the Civil War thatreflected a “Biercian” emphasis on corporeality. The soldier's body proves that the individual is no longer in possession of his right to personality and is now irrelevant in any faculties other than those required of a soldier. Like Bierce, Crane seems to deplore the institution of war because of its systematic dehumanization and the neglect with which dominant society recognizes the true extent of its physical and emotional disadvantages. By focusing on a critique of contemporary society rather than an illustration of the trauma of combat, Crane reveals his lack of combat experience and fails to convey the same trauma that only a veteran can convey. As the book continues, The Red Badge of Courage takes further departures from the reality of war as Bierce illustrated it. Henry encounters many soldiers whose physical appearance reveals stories of trauma, but unlike Bierce, the irony of their situation is much more obvious. For example, Henry meets a mortally wounded friend, Jim.Conklin, who says the following quote: “I tell you what I'm afraid of, Henry, I'll tell you what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid of falling - and, you know, those damn artillery wagons - they don't like to run over me. That’s what I’m afraid of…”. Jim's chilling recognition of the impending degradation of his body indicates an awareness of the ways in which war objectifies the individual and ensures the soldier's physical humiliation even in death. The scene is completely ironic in nature; the audience knows that Henry is unreliable and that, in reality, he is probably incapable of preventing the physical desecration of Jim's body. Jim's final act, a literal attempt to stand in the face of death but ultimately fall like any other soldier, cements irony as the central literary device used by Crane in his use of bodily imagery. As an endlessly used and contextually repetitive narrative style, Crane once again proves incapable of illustrating war in its precise complexity as a lived experience. Finally, the illustration of the human corpse in Crane's book is a realistic but much less influential narrative force. particularly in its failure to provoke the same trauma as the illustrations based on Bierce's experience. In one of the text's most famous passages, describing Henry's sense of peace in nature shattered by the sight of a rotting corpse against a nearby tree. Using expressionism as a stylistic foundation for the reader's experience, Crane describes the corpse in increasing levels of revolting detail, moving from "the uniform that was once blue" to a considerably more graphic one: "On the gray skin of the face little ants were running around. One of them had a sort of bundle along his upper lip. Like Bierce, Crane uses language to ferment a specific image of death as a product of war, and although it is an accurate description of a rotting corpse, the soldier's anonymity deprives the reader of the Chickamauga personalized trauma. It's a horrifying device, with shock value and independently powerful, but it's significantly less devastating than the site of a murdered mother as in Bierce's story. By discussing the subtle differences in the descriptive impact of Bierce and Crane, I have attempted to illustrate the importance of narrative voice and authorial context in the production of the American war story. Bierce is the undeniable authority in the creation of a fictional war story, as evidenced by his revolutionary reappropriation of fictional style to convey a non-fictional experience of trauma. Chickamauga illustrates the profound capacity for.