Chickamauga

One notable aspect of this story is its use of language. The story uses very different tonal registers at different various times. At the story’s opening, for instance—when the omniscient narrator is describing the boy and his love for all things military—the tone is elevated and mock-heroic. This creates an effect of distancing irony, similar to the distance that the boy himself feels from the destructive, gruesome aspects of war. The boy, who has been schooled by his father to idealize war and fighting, is fascinated by military strategies and by stories of conquering and heroism; he does not yet feel touched by the devastation that war leaves behind. While we are told that the boy has fighting in his blood, there is also a suggestion that the high rhetoric of the story’s opening is the same rhetoric that is often used to justify fighting and carnage. The language in the opening is both so weighty and so abstract—“From the cradle of its race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a great sea had penetrated a third[…]” (Paragraph 1)—that the reader senses an unwieldiness to it (Paragraph 1).