A Horseman in the Sky

“This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary dooryard, but was really several acres in extent.”

The visual descriptions throughout the story feature illusions caused by perspective, distance, and scale. Here a vast distant space is easily mistaken for a small yard. Ambrose Bierce employs a type of visual irony in which things are the opposite of what they appear to be.

“No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.”

Humanity, not nature, is the agent of war in this story. “Theater” is not only the customary word for the region in which a battle is fought. It also foreshadows the tragic spectacle at the center of the story.

“The sleeping sentinel in the clump of laurel was a young Virginian named Carter Druse. He was the son of wealthy parents, an only child, and had known such ease and cultivation and high living as wealth and taste were able to command in the mountain country of western Virginia.”

Druse lived a sheltered life so he may not recognize the gravity of his decision to go to war and the hardships he will face. As an only child, he likely received much attention and support, as evidenced by the comfort and cultivation of his youth.

“One morning he had risen from the breakfast-table and said, quietly but gravely: ‘Father, a Union regiment has arrived at Grafton. I am going to join it.’”

Druse’s declaration appears resolved, earnest, and nervous, delivered after abruptly standing up over breakfast. He is not preparing to discuss or argue his intention, but, having worked up the courage, he announces it as a settled decision.

“Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur, do what you conceive to be your duty. Virginia, to which you are a traitor, must get on without you.”

The father does not attempt to stop Druse, though he does declare him a traitor. He may even respect his son’s decision, admitting that “duty” may be a relative term, “conceived” differently by different individuals. This flexibility in a term that would seem to demand inflexible adherence eventually gives rise to Druse’s impossible dilemma between two duties later in the story.

“So Carter Druse, bowing reverently to his father, who returned the salute with a stately courtesy that masked a breaking heart, left the home of his childhood to go soldiering.”

The emotional tie between father and son is apparent, though constrained by formality. Druse bows with genuine respect, while the father’s salute masks a tumult of sadness. The phrase “go soldiering” suggests that Druse has not quite left childhood, that war may yet seem but an extension of play rather than a violent and painful commitment.

“By conscience and courage, by deeds and daring, he soon commended himself to his fellows and officers.”

This sentence indicates Druse’s success in the military in contrast to the “criminality” with which he’s introduced in the story. These passages suggest the narrator has an ambiguous attitude toward the protagonist and also toward war. The alliteration sounds poetic and rollicking, suggesting a cliched, romanticized picture of military heroism at odds with the stark horror of Druse’s eventual patricide.

“Nevertheless, fatigue had been stronger than resolution, and he had fallen asleep. What good or bad angel came in a dream to rouse him from his state of crime, who shall say?”

The narrator reveals Druse’s dereliction of duty to be a matter of exhaustion, not laziness or neglect. The “crime” as a legal abstraction ignores both human limits and mitigating circumstances, just as other abstractions in the story, such as duty and heroism, obscure human realities.

“[S]ome invisible messenger of fate touched with unsealing finger the eyes of his consciousness—whispered into the ear of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever have spoken, no human memory ever has recalled.”

The “unsealing” of the eyes alludes to biblical notions of conversion—as when the scales fell from the eyes of the apostle Paul, and he recognizes the truth of Christ. Because the precise moment of waking—as banal as it is—remains stubbornly beyond consciousness, the narrator places it in the realm of supernatural mystery, of fate and spirit.

“His first feeling was a keen artistic delight. On a colossal pedestal, the cliff,—motionless at the extreme edge of the capping rock and sharply outlined against the sky,—was an equestrian statue of impressive dignity.”

Druse sees the horseman as an aesthetic object within an aesthetic landscape. The “impressive dignity” and other qualities conveyed by the statue reflect the glories of war and martial virtue, showing that war, too, is often conceived in aesthetically pleasing terms (especially by those who have never seen combat).

“For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that commanding eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part.”

The reference to dream underscores Druse’s uncertain connection to reality. The work of art he imagines he sees refers to the way history idealizes and aestheticizes war, in contrast to Druse’s already “inglorious” lived experience. The narrator’s tone again shifts from highlighting Druse’s courage and virtue to suggesting that his part in the war was “inglorious.”

“[P]erhaps he is but admiring the sublimity of the landscape.”

Druse makes explicit the sublime characteristics of the natural setting that have been implicit in the narrator’s descriptions. He hopes the horseman, his father, is admiring the aesthetic, ennobling qualities of the dramatic landscape. In this way, Bierce places the story in conversation with Romantic literature.

“Duty had conquered; the spirit had said to the body: ‘Peace, be still.’ He fired.”

Druse quells his inner turmoil over whether to shoot his father by committing to duty as he conceives it: duty to his fellow soldiers and the Union cause. Duty enables spiritual transcendence of the body it has “conquered.” By implication, the body encompasses Druse’s emotions, his frayed nerves, and his familial ties and affections.