logo

21 pages 42 minutes read

Ambrose Bierce

The Boarded Window

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1891

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Character Analysis

Ambrose Bierce

A veteran of the US Civil War, Ambrose Bierce became a journalist, critic, satirist, and short story writer whose tales made him a giant of American literature. His terror-tinged tales bespeak the horrors of war and the unsettling fears of daily life. Known for his sharp, caustic wit, Bierce could be bitingly funny or eerily frightening. His most famous work, The Devil’s Dictionary, is a darkly humorous compilation of word definitions that make pointed fun of human foibles. He also wrote fairy tales and children’s stories. One of his many story collections, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, contains his most famous story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as well as the macabre work “The Boarded Window.” Bierce died mysteriously in 1913 at age 71 while covering Pancho Villa’s army during the Mexican Revolution. His body was never found.

Murlock

Murlock arrives at the great forest a full of youthful ambitions for a frontier life with his beloved bride. Fate scuttles the couple’s plans after Murlock mistakes his wife’s descent into unconsciousness from sudden illness for death. He prepares her body for burial, only to lose her, still alive, to the predations of a panther. Murlock’s failure is multifold: He does not live up to the traditional masculine ideals of being a protector, and his lack of visible grief at his wife’s seeming death questions the depth of his husbandly feelings.

After his wife’s real death, he lives a guilt-ridden life empty of ambition, ages prematurely, and dies alone in the cabin where his wife was slain. He boards up the window through which the panther leapt as a memorial of sorts. Murlock represents the devastation that can haunt people who survive the killing of a loved one while feeling responsible for that death.

Murlock’s wife

Murlock’s unnamed young wife, “in all ways worthy of his honest devotion [sharing] the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart” (Paragraph 5), is less a character and more a symbol of Murlock’s failure as a protector—her death demonstrates his inability to live up to 19th century ideals of masculinity. His wife’s sudden, fevered illness causes her to lapse into a comatose state so deep that she appears to be dead to his medically untrained eye. However, that night, she fights off a predatory panther and protects her sleeping husband. Only the next morning does he husband find her truly dead, her throat slashed by the animal. 

Panther

The panther (interchangeably called a painter, puma, catamount, cougar, or mountain lion in 19th century America) is an opportunist that takes advantage of Murlock’s confusion and clotted grief to raid the body of his wife. Murlock chases away the beast, but his efforts are too late, for the creature already has dealt her a lethal blow. The panther symbolizes the death that comes to everyone, as well as the ruthless cruelty of nature in pioneer life.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text