The Impermanence of Death: Ontological Imagination Regarding Souls and Death in the Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce

Abstract

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), American author, poet, and journalist inhabits an intriguing position in the American literary canon due to his diverse forms and genres of writings. However, despite the diversity of his works, there exists a common thread across his fiction and journalism and that is – death. Bierce holds a proficiency in representing death with both acute imagination and great philosophical depth. The aim of this paper is to analyse his treatment of the macabre subject matter and to investigate how he problematizes the mainstream idea of permanence of death. Using the theories of Farah Mendlesohn and Mark J.P. Wolf as a scaffolding, the paper relies on three of Bierce’s short stories, – “John Bartine’s Watch,” “The Boarded Window,” and “A Baby Tramp” – to demonstrate how the author challenges conventionally-held understanding of human mortality by foregrounding death as an unstable condition, capable of being a negotiable and transformative process, with the possibility of being impermanent. The paper argues that Bierce elevates death from merely being an ending to a transformative state which dilutes the boundaries between the material and the immaterial as well as those between the animate and the inanimate. In doing so, Bierce transforms horror fiction to a philosophical exploration of various ontological questions about the nature of reality, the porous boundaries between philosophy and science, and offering important reflections on the concepts of death and soul.