Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - M. Thomas Inge: Sam Watkins and the Fictionality of Fact

At the time Watkins was writing in 1881, American literature was moving largely under the influence of realism. While such writers as William Dean Howells and Henry James felt the writer should devote himself to describing the tasteful and the beautiful in the world of daily life, others such as Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Kat^ Chopin, and Frank Norris moved the focus directly on the tragic aspects of life and painted a sometimes horrifying view of man fighting a hostile, mechanical world of injustice and sudden death. In attempting to describe his experiences in what he called an "unholy and uncalled for war" (W, 94), Watkins instinctively adopted the methods of realism and spared the reader nothing in describing the horror and brutality of the battlefield. It is interesting to compare the way Bierce and Watkins describe one of the same engagements at which both were witnesses, the bloody battle of Chickamauga. Bierce's story "Chickamauga," written around 1889, over 25 years after the event, adopts the strategy of limiting the point of view to that of a six-year-old deaf and mute child who has wandered onto the battlefield by mistake, before moving to a larger adult perspective to render ironic judgement on the carnage. The child mistakes wounded soldiers dragging themselves to a creek for water as bear-like but gentle creatures with which he can play: He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride. The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw

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from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.

6 In his chapter on Chickamauga, Watkins includes a strikingly similar image in describing the aftermath of battle as he walks across the field of slaughter: 6 The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Citadel Press, 1946) 21. 52