Childhood and the Fear of Death in Ambrose Bierce's The Parenticide Club and “Visions of the Night”

Ambrose Bierce, whose writings are replete with themes and images of violent death, is most remembered today for his Civil War short stories, and especially for the much anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” A number of Bierce's tales and essays, however, feature family violence and parricide, suggesting that the author's obsessive concern with death may have earlier antecedents than his own experiences as a Union soldier in the Civil War. Broadening previous psychoanalytic approaches, this essay uses post-Freudian perspectives on the psychology of death and the unconscious, as well as relevant historical, cultural, and literary contexts, to consider Bierce's childhood and his subsequent life experiences as they relate to writings such as The Parenticide Club, a collection of four bizarre tales of parricide, and “Visions of the Night,” a recollection of three persistent nightmares from the author's youth and adulthood. These writings, as well as the writer's gothic tales, suggest that in many ways Bierce recognized the importance of dreams in the work of the unconscious and the primal nature of the fear of death in humanity.