25 pages • 50 minutes read
A Horseman in the Sky
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Background
Authorial Context: Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce drew from personal experience for “A Horseman in the Sky.” He enlisted with Union forces days after the outbreak of the war and participated in many heated engagements, including the Battle of Shiloh. He was distinguished for bravery during his service and at one point even survived a gunshot wound to the head. His intimacy with the horrors and banalities of combat informs his realist, anti-Romantic view of war in “A Horseman in the Sky,” where the main character is introduced asleep at post rather than engaged in acts of valor.
The Civil War (1861-1865) pitted Union forces of the northern states against the secessionist Confederate forces of the South. The tragedy of this conflict, which sometimes saw close relations and friends taking arms against one another, appears throughout Bierce’s war fiction. In “A Horseman in the Sky,” it manifests in the choice the protagonist must make whether to endanger his comrades or kill his father.
A distinguished career in journalism on the West Coast followed Bierce’s time in the military. Though remembered now mostly for his short stories, which included gothic tales of the paranormal in addition to his Civil War stories, Bierce was famous in his time as a biting social, political, and cultural critic, columnist, and author of epigrams. His unsentimental view of humanity and demanding standards of style permeate both his fiction and nonfiction.
Literary Context: Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism
While “A Horseman in the Sky” betrays some Romantic tendencies, it largely undercuts them in the name of realism. Romanticism was a broad, international cultural movement that originated in Europe in the late 1700s and encompassed literature, philosophy, and the arts. In the United States, literary Romanticism was represented by the Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendentalists emphasized individual experience and insight over inherited beliefs and traditions and tended toward an optimistic view of human beings. These themes of individualism, imagination, and nature were typical of Romanticism in England and Germany in addition to the United States.
In “A Horseman in the Sky,” the narrator details a wild natural scene that would fit well in the Romantic tradition of sublime landscapes—awe-inspiring vistas that at once terrify and inspire. The narrator says that if Druse had been awake it might have left him “giddy to look”) at the landscape below him (3). At one point, Druse hopes for a moment that the horseman does not see the hidden troops but is only there to admire “the sublimity of the landscape” (6).
But the horseman is indeed observing the Union regiments rather than the wonders of nature. Furthermore, the story dismantles idealized notions of war and duty as it proceeds. Whatever exalted beliefs or principles may have guided Druse’s decision to join the Union army, and so cut ties with his family and Virginia, the story is far less heroic: He succumbs to the biological need for sleep, wakes through no agency of his own, and then shoots at his father, who falls horribly to his death from a cliff as a result.
Bierce’s short story thus displays some characteristics of Realism and Naturalism—the literary movements generally understood to succeed Romanticism in the United States—in portraying the banal and messy realities of war as he knew it on the one hand and, on the other, showing human beings limited by their biology and psychology (needing to sleep, for instance, susceptible to optical illusions and hallucinatory experience). Chronologically, Bierce precedes many of the authors associated with those movements, such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris.
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By Ambrose Bierce
