Analyse de : Killed at Resaca (Tué à Résaca) - Ambrose Bierce (document en anglais).

Killed at Resaca by Ambrose Bierce is a piece of prose written in 1891. The story take place on a battlefield where the unnamed narrator see his friend die. The narrator will receive the Russia-leather pocketbook of his dead friend. A year after, he decides to open the pocketbook and find a love letter, disable by what he has just read he decide to give back the letter to the woman who wrote it. Briece use a very effective description and narratives techniques to immerse the reader in a powerful declaration to the home front during the war.

First of all, Bierce uses a static and unclear description to describe the battlefield. He uses the negation “not” three times, words such as “break the silence”, “firing ceased”. They set the story in a fixed time as if the time had stop. Bierce uses personification, “mysterious coincidence” which emphasis on narrator incapacity of describing the scene. It seems that time has just stop. One could understand that Bierce is creating that immobile scene to describe the narrator shock because of the lost of his friend.

Moreover, Bierce is severely criticizing the useless goal of war. He describes it as a “profitless crime” where “generous enemy honored the fallen brave”. Bierce uses metaphor to describe the war, he is not saying directly to the reader that war is useless but he is trying to appeal the reader pity. The fact that even the enemy is honoring his friend death shows that soldiers understand each over Therefore, among the reader’s mind it is created a sense of pity for the soldiers that are scarifying themselves and creates a felling of anger

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