[In the following excerpt, Berthoff provides a brief overview of Ambrose Bierce's short stories and compares his short fiction to that of Edgar Allan Poe.]

Ambrose Bierce … has maintained a curious kind of underground reputation, less as a maker of books than as a personal legend, a minority saint for the cynical and disenchanted. (A passion for taut, precise, desentimentalizing English is a special part of this legend.) Growing up into the holocaust of the Civil War, in which he served with honor and was badly wounded, he became a writer whose voice and outlook are more impressive than the literary uses he managed to put them to. He survives as a figure of bitter dissent and disaffiliation—from the bluster and prodigality of the Gilded Age, from its daydreams of comfort and success, from all its gross connivance in hypocrisy and untruth. It was as such, a scarifier of his times and an honest measure of their moral shabbiness, that the critic Percival Pollard celebrated Bierce in Their Day in Court (1909) as “the one commanding figure in our time.”

The very peremptoriness of his naysaying, however, limited Bierce's authority as a satirist and moral critic. Nonetheless his Fantastic Fables …, sardonically reviewing the rules and conditions for success in contemporary society, do pungently underscore the more formidable critique of the sociology of the leisure classes that Thorstein Veblen published in the same year; Bierce's indictment is less substantial but rather more absolute. His point of view is even more starkly expressed in The Cynic's Word Book (… reissued as The Devil's Dictionary), a book worth keeping in print and commending to the young and their teachers, although by reason of its piecemeal form this collection of “old saws fitted with new teeth” loses bite when read straight through. Bierce's major achievement is rather in his two volumes of stories, In the Midst of Life (… also issued as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians) and Can Such Things Be?. … Even these stories are perhaps most impressive as emotional gestures. The second title suggests their essential form: a shocked outcry against the horrors and violations of life in what is called peace as well as in war. There is not much invention or variation in these stories. Eventually the ironies they turn upon appear mechanical. … We begin, in fact, to see that the fidelity of these savage anecdotes is not to the way “things are” in the world but to the shocked and haunted consciousness of the writer himself. Yet the feelings he writes from—outrage, despair, desolation, grim resignation—do him credit.

Always tightly made, Bierce's stories renew a standard of form set by his master, Poe. Like Poe's they are distinguished by descriptive intensity and a strict economy of means; they are as compact and bare as mathematical equations—which is partly why they are not greatly interesting as stories. Where they are most effective is in indicating the weariness and the barbarism of men in the front lines of war; and, as we sense that for Bierce these frontline conditions are somehow only an intensification of the norm of human life, we must grant that we cannot easily argue him wrong. Perhaps the real terror of his work is in suggesting how naturally men can be brought to give to the anguished question, “Can such things be?” the numbed answer, “Yes, of course.”

The vision of life in Bierce's work, though intensely personal, is also very much of its time. It is close to that of the school of “naturalism,” which was entering American literature around 1900 with the generation of Norris, Stephen Crane, and Dreiser. Under the assault of the mindless, amoral forces of nature—or of a society equally savage—men are seen as victims and casualties of agencies beyond their control. If they survive, it is by some crippling process of dehumanization.