Security in a Second Hand: The False Comforts of Time

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NO DISCUSSION OF THE PRESENTATION OF TIME in Bierce’s fiction would be complete without some examination of the role watches and timepieces play in his work. As early as the “Little Isaac” vignette in The Fiend’s Delight (1871), Bierce has used watches and clocks to vividly symbolize man’s ineffective attempts to control such a parahuman verity as time. [50] As Isaac Gobwottle is accidentally smothering his non-existent son, the clock in the room “seemed to be measuring” the progression of time (9). The inclusion of “seemed” here offers skepticism as to whether time in fact is being, or even can be, measured.

Man’s attempt to create artificial definitions, limits, and measurements in the desperate attempt to exercise control, mastery, and agency over time becomes a frequent target of Biercian mockery, and the watch becomes the most common symbol of this futility. [51] There is no shortage of Bierce characters who turn to the hollow comforts of their watches when faced with circumstances in which they are at risk of losing control. In “A Wireless Message,” William Holt responds to his bizarre timeless surroundings, the inexplicable reddish glow, and his ceaselessly preceding shadow by consulting his watch: “to test the intensity of the light whose nature and cause he could not determine, he took out his watch to see if he could make out the figures on the dial” (135). The narrator of “The Haunted Valley” [52] anticipates the moment of frightful revelation of Jo. Dunfer’s murder of a Chinese immigrant by “the affectation of winding my watch at that unusual hour, and with needless care and deliberation” (121). John Bartine’s obsession is not with time, but with time as represented and controlled by his watch. The narrator of “One of Twins” and John Hardshaw, the central character of “The Man Out of the Nose,” likewise turn to watches for succor in disturbing circumstances. What all of these instances have in common is the desire to meet perplexing, challenging, and terrifying moments with a physical reminder of the power mankind wields that is represented by the timepiece. The other commonality among these scenes is that the comfort is hollow, the solace ephemeral, and whatever calamity or horrifying truth looms comes nonetheless. The watch, then, becomes the vehicle of Bierce’s mockery of mankind’s exalted sense of power and of control. As Solomon notes in connection to Bierce’s war stories, characters discover that “time cannot be controlled by the individual” (188).

The story in which this disillusioned control of time is most fully developed is “One of the Missing.” [53] While most critics regard the story as an exploration of the ability of individual experiences of fear to overwhelm one’s internal defenses, no matter the level of bravery previously displayed, the story also offers a complex exploration of time equal to those evinced in “John Bartine’s Watch,” The Death of Halpin Frayser,” or “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

As Jerome Searing, a private scout in the Federal army, advances past the picket in a dangerous foray into potentially Confederate territory, he notes that the course of his progress “seems like a long time”: an observation that floats, as the opening paragraphs of “The Death of Halpin Frayser” do, the idea that time is a matter of relative perspective (265).

Time compression is also featured in the tale, most notably in Searing’s flashback to a childhood memory as he awaits what he thinks is his looming death. As he mentally revisits his childhood haunts at Ghost Rock and Dead Man’s Cave, “for the first time he observed that the opening of the haunted cavern was encircled by a ring of metal” (271). The intruding ring is of course the barrel of Searing’s rifle currently aimed at his head; this present-tense reality is blended into the past memory.

While “One of the Missing” offers additional evidence of various methods of time manipulation already discussed above, the story’s main contribution to a study of time in Bierce’s work is the fully developed depiction of the inability of its characters to accurately gauge the true passage of time. As Searing witnesses the Confederate forces retreating and decides to fire a bullet into the mass of men, the narration interrupts itself to present a lengthy discourse on how Searing’s decisions and actions are unable to offer any impact on the temporal connection between events. Searing’s act “would probably not affect the duration and results of the war” (266). The reason is that

It was decreed from the beginning of time that Private Searing was not to murder anybody that bright summer morning, nor was the Confederate retreat to be announced by him. For countless ages events had been so matching themselves together in that wondrous mosaic to some parts of which, dimly discernable, we give the name of history, that the acts which he had in will would have harmed the pattern. Some twenty-five years previously the Power charged with the execution of the work according to the design had provided against that mischance by causing the birth of a certain male child in a little village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, had carefully reared it, supervised its education, directed its desires into a military channel, and in due time made it an officer of artillery. . . . Nothing had been neglected—at every step in the progress of both these men’s lives, and in the lives of their contemporaries and ancestors, and in the lives of the contemporaries of their ancestors, the right thing had been done to bring about the desired result. (266-7) [54]

Thus, the seemingly random act of a bored Confederate captain of artillery firing off one of his guns, hitting Searing’s hiding-place and trapping him under the debris, is in fact part of a carefully ordered chain of events designed and controlled by “the Power charged with the execution of the work according to the design.” In other words, Searing, and by extension all mankind, does not have the ability to either control or understand the workings of time; history is merely a “dimly discernable” part of the “mosaic” of time; chronology is beyond us.

Set against the backdrop of a higher ordering of Time beyond human comprehension or manipulation, both Searing and later his brother erroneously interpret temporal events around them. [55] The first instance occurs as Searing regains consciousness after the collapse of the building. He assumes he is dead and recalls portions of his burial service. Yet his “term of unconsciousness, including the period of recovery, during which he had had the strange fancies, had probably not exceeded a few seconds” (268). The actual duration of his unconsciousness is contrasted with his expectation that a stoppage in perceived time equals death. So strong is this association that he is able to mentally recreate events that never actually happened.

The second instance occurs at the story’s conclusion. Searing’s brother, a lieutenant in command of the picket line Jerome passed earlier, discovers (but does recognize) his brother’s body. Lieutenant Searing had glanced at his watch at the sound of the random Confederate cannon fire, noting the time as 6:18. He glances at the watch again after seeing the body; it reads 6:40. Despite the fact that only twenty-two minutes have passed, he declares the body has been “dead a week” (274). Once again, the human construct of time has failed to accurately explain events. [56]

A final way in which Bierce adopts the timepiece as a preferred symbol for the folly of man’s assumption of control over time can be found in the stories “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “A Man Out of the Nose.” In both stories, the central characters are ultimately reduced to pieces of human clockwork as Bierce sardonically mirrors elements of Greek mythology, particularly the morbidly ironic punishments enforced onto characters such as Sisyphus and Tantalus.

In “A Man Out of the Nose,” [57] the reader is confronted with a house noteworthy “for its rude resemblance to the human face, or rather to such a simulacrum of it as a boy might cut out of a hollowed pumpkin, meaning no offense to his race. The eyes are two circular windows, the nose is a door, the mouth an aperture caused by removal of a board below” (206). Out of the “nose” of this grotesque caricature of a human face, John Hardshaw advances in a mechanical way along a set track of sidewalks; his journey never varies nor does he speak or in any way alter the fixed pattern.

Time is a fundamental component of his automatic wanderings. We are told that “the time of day is an important element in the man’s movements, for it is at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon that he comes forth 365 times a year” (206). [58] As a result of the complications stemming from an extramarital affair (which include a three year stay in San Quentin following a conviction for burglary, witnessing the death of the woman with whom he had the affair, and a stay in an insane asylum), Hardshaw is no longer human; he has become an automaton in a life-sized, morbidly elaborate clock. [59]

An equally grotesque end awaits Peyton Farquhar in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” At the split between objective and subjective time that drives the third section of the story, the sergeant releases the board holding Farquhar up. Farquhar is soon “conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum” (309). The imagined escape notwithstanding, this is the last image of Peyton Farquhar with which the reader is left; he is subsumed into the very invention meant to offer him control. In a story so heavily focused on experiences of time, it seems fitting that the final image is that of the central figure metamorphosed into a component piece of the invention that offers such hollow comforts to those who seek its self-delusional solace.

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Essay Table of Contents

1. "No Matter What the Actual Hour May Be:" Time Manipulation in the Works of Ambrose Bierce

2. Disjointed Chronology: Bierce's Temporal Shell Game

3. Lives on Hold: Paused Timelines

4. Time Manipulation: Expansion, Compression, and Irrelevance of Time

5. Time Hubs: Intersections of Time and Space

> 6. Security in a Second Hand: The False Comforts of Time

7. Final Thoughts: Bierce's Place in Time

8. Notes

9. Works Cited