25 pages • 50 minutes read
Ambrose BierceA Horseman in the Sky
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Statue
The statue—and the related motif of motionlessness—relates to the themes of The Dehumanizing Effects of War and war as overly romanticized. The story implies a connection between the statues that typically commemorate war and the military virtues they seem to embody: stillness, firmness, resolution, and stony adherence to duty. The father/statue possesses these qualities, which represent an idealization of military life. Later, the son becomes statue-like in his apparent numbness, pallor, and immobility—the cost of suppressing his humanity in pursuit of duty. As a symbol, statues thus suggest a range of meanings, encompassing both positive and negative aspects of being a soldier.
Laurel
Druse spends most of the narrative hiding in a “clump of laurel” (3). This detail holds true for the geography of western Virginia, where Ambrose Bierce fought in the Civil War. He writes about the “clumps of laurel” (656) prevalent there in “On a Mountain,” a nonfiction essay about his military experience.
While expressing Bierce’s realism, laurel also provides symbolic significance. In ancient Greece and Rome, wreaths of laurel were symbols of victory, and that meaning has persisted over centuries of Western art. Bierce alludes to the use of laurel by “illustrious Romans” (656) in his Civil War memoirs. When Druse first wakes up, he looks out “between the masking stems of the laurels” (5). The laurel symbolizes not victory but the ways people mask the human consequences of war. The laurel hides Druse, suggesting a wreath framing his face. Such symbolic wreaths are the product of human artifice, fashioned from the raw materials of nature.
The Horseman in the Sky
The titular horseman in the sky alludes to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but also to mythical figures more generally such as Pegasus, an association prepared for by descriptions of the father’s age and authority. Like a prophet witnessing the power of God in the Bible, the unnamed officer who sees the horseman’s “flight” is struck with “terror and amazement” and half-believes “himself the chosen scribe of some new Apocalypse” (8). The horseman resonates with the dual meanings of apocalypse as both destruction and revelation—the damage to the Druse family and the revelation of the horrors of war. It relates to the theme of war and its representation, as well as to the limits of human perception, a motif that surfaces throughout the text.
As a vehicle of revelation, the horseman would seem to reveal the divine to the officer, but it really reveals the consequences of Druse’s gunshot. The flying horseman replaces the event of the shooting, revealing what happened indirectly. Insofar as it seems a revelation of the supernatural to the officer, he cannot tell anyone, as they won’t believe him. The horseman stands in for efforts to represent the unrepresentable, including the traumatic, the horrible, and that which completely defies expectations. It may also recall how humans resort to myth in dealing with the incomprehensible, an idea suggested in the last lines of the story: in response to hearing of the patricide, all the sergeant can do is exclaim “Good God!” (9).
Related Titles
By Ambrose Bierce
