A resumed identity
A Resumed Identity ( A recovered identity , a continuing identity ) is the title of a short story by the American writer Ambrose Bierce . It was featured in his second collection of short stories, Can Such Things Be? released.
The work belongs to the group of stories set in the American Civil War and depicts the final hours of a man who long ago fought as a lieutenant in the Union Army in the Battle of the Stones River and who, shortly before his death, realizes that the past few years have passed and he is already an old man in civilian clothes.
In the relatively short story, Bierce deals with war experiences that he had as a young soldier and that shaped his literary and journalistic work to the end of his life.
content
Shortly before dawn, a man finds himself on a hill and looks at the surroundings, which lie before him like a pastoral landscape in the calm of the dawning.
In a southerly direction, on the road that shimmered in the moonlight, he first saw a group of horsemen , then columns and finally an entire army approaching him, passing silently and disappearing into the darkness of the north. When he speaks to himself and can hear his voice, he knows that he is not deaf , but is amazed at its strange sound. He remembers the phenomenon of the “acoustic shadow”, within which one cannot hear sounds from a certain direction. The man fears that the army , which is presumably marching to Nashville , has lost the battle, believes he is a straggler and believes that he must carefully follow it in order not to be discovered.
He meets a doctor who is riding home and is just passing the Stones River battlefield. The man greets him militarily, introduces himself as a lieutenant from General Hazen's staff and asks what happened and who won the battle. The rider notices that the unexpected interlocutor is not wearing a uniform and does not seem like a soldier. When asked about his condition, the man touches his head, but cannot find any blood and suspects that he was merely grazed by a shot. He probably woke up from an unconsciousness and now wants to reach his command. The doctor, thinking of amnesia and lost identity, speaks of his civilian clothes, doubts the stated age of only 23 years and declares that he has not seen any troops, whereupon the questioner leaves him angrily.
When the exhausted man runs his hands over his face a little later, it is wrinkled and furrowed, and he wonders how a harmless injury turned him into a wreck. It occurs to him that the battle took place in December, but it is now summer and that is why he was probably lying in the hospital for a long time and escaped from there. He passes a weathered, moss-covered memorial and reads the inscription : "Hazen's Brigade in memory of their soldiers, fell at Stones River on Dec. 31, 1862."
Shaken, he sinks back, crawls to a pond filled with rainwater and looks at his reflection. When he sees the face of an old man, he cries out in horror. He plunges face first into the water and "gives up the life that another life had outlasted."
background
The Civil War was the most formative event of his life and remained at the center of his literary and journalistic work until its mysterious disappearance during the Mexican Civil War .
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Bierce reported to a regiment in Indiana and was assigned a scout there. He took part in the preparations for the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga , was wounded twice (for example on June 23, 1864 during the Atlanta campaign at Kennesaw Mountain) and was promoted several times for his bravery, so that at the end of the war he was promoted to the rank of titular major held.
Like the lost hero who suffers a mortal shock at the end of the story, Bierce was himself a lieutenant after his unexpected promotion on December 1, 1862 and was part of General William Babcock Hazen's brigade, under whom he took part in the bloody battle of the Stones River but was not wounded.
details
With the “acoustic shadow” Bierce could have referred to an experience of Don Carlos Buell , who later had to hand over the Cumberland Army to Major General William Starke Rosecrans .
Bierce was very fond of Buell and praised him profusely, while he did not take Rosecrans seriously and described him as a “first-rate mess”. In December 1898, in an article in the San Francisco Examiner , he underlined his merits in the Battle of Shiloh , which later President Ulysses S. Grant had not properly assessed and deliberately downplayed.
Buell, who had been criticized for his leniency against the civilian population in Alabama , could not hear the thunder of the guns just a few miles away during the fighting in the Battle of Perryville , which is why much of his force is overrun by the Confederates under General Braxton Bragg the sooner he noticed. The newly arriving Union units, including the Bierce regiment, prevented the fighting from flaring up again in the days that followed. Since Buell had left the rest of the Confederate troops unmolested in eastern Tennessee, he was released on October 24, 1862 by Abraham Lincoln . On the occasion of his death 30 years later, Bierce described him as an "outstanding figure" and as someone who was considered by many veterans to be "the most capable man of the whole war," an assessment Hazen shared.
literature
Text output
- Ambrose Bierce : The Collected Stories and the Devil's Dictionary. From the American by Jan-Wellem van Diekmes, Viola Eigenberz, Gisbert Haefs and Trautchen Neetix. Edited by Gisbert Haefs, Zurich, Haffmans Verlag. Licensed edition for two thousand and one, ISBN 978-3251203086 , p. 190197
Secondary literature
- Jerôme von Gebsattel: Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, A resumed identity. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 2, Munich 1989, pp. 671-672
- Roy Morris: Ambrose Bierce. Alone in bad company. Biography. Zurich: Haffmans Verlag 1999, ISBN 3-251-20286-3 , pp. 85-88
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ambrose Bierce: A Continuing Identity. In: The Collected Stories and the Devil's Dictionary. From the American by Jan-Wellem van Diekmes, Zurich, Haffmans Verlag 2000. Licensed edition for two thousand and one, p. 197
- ↑ Ambrose Bierce: A Continuing Identity. In: The Collected Stories and the Devil's Dictionary. From the American by Jan-Wellem van Diekmes. Zurich, Haffmans Verlag 2000. Licensed edition for two thousand and one, p. 197
- ↑ Rainer Schöwerling: Ambrose Bierce · An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1981, p. 149
- ↑ Gisbert Haefs , In: Ambrose Bierce The Collected Stories and the Devil's Dictionary. From the American by Jan-Wellem van Diekmes. Zurich, Haffmans Verlag 2000. Licensed edition for two thousand and one. Appendix, To Ambrose Bierce. P. 1087
- ^ Roy Morris: Ambrose Bierce. Alone in bad company. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, pp. 83, 87
- ^ Roy Morris: Ambrose Bierce. Alone in bad company. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 70
- ^ Roy Morris: Ambrose Bierce. Alone in bad company. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, pp. 78, 79
- ↑ Quoted from: Roy Morris: Ambrose Bierce. Alone in bad company. Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 79