An Episode of War

One of the notable things about the manner in which this story begins is the decidedly anticlimactic waythat the lieutenant gets shot at the beginning: “[…] suddenly the lieutenant cried out and looked quickly at a man near him as if he suspected it was a case of personal assault. The others cried out also when they saw blood upon the lieutenant’s sleeve” (paragraph 2, sentence 3). At first, Crane does not make it apparent that the lieutenant has been shot. Instead, he leaves the reader to wonder what has happened, and then only hints at it in the following sentence with the word blood. This deemphasizes the violence of the act and instead creates a sense of surprise in the reader which parallels that of the characters in the story. We see this technique again later in the story, with the final few lines. The transition between the last two paragraphs reads, “his glance fixed upon the door of the old school house, as sinister to him as the portals of death. And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm” (paragraph 23, sentence 1). Here, the climactic moment of the entire story is deemphasized and told in a matter-of-fact, undramatic way that contrasts with reader expectation. Crane uses anticlimax alongside other literary devices, such as defamiliarization and synecdoche, in order to create similar effects throughout the story which effectively mirror the experience of war.