The Boarded Window | Cryptic Aspects of The Boarded Window
In the following essay,
the author discusses the cryptic aspects of ‘‘The Boarded
Window’’ and examines its treatment of
reclusiveness.
In her 1984 study, The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce, Cathy Davidson says that some of Bierce’s stories create a sense of ‘‘perceptual confusion’’ in the characters or the readers or both. There is a sense of mystery or ‘‘indeterminacy,’’ sometimes with two different views of events being presented, so that it is hard to know what actually happened. Or, as in a story like ‘‘The Death of Halpin Frayser,’’ everything is so uncertain that the reader is left utterly baffled.
Bierce’s point in creating such bafflement may be to suggest that...
[The entire page is 1723 words long]
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