The Death of Halpin Frayser

One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: 'Catharine Larue.' He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said so much.

Over the decades, I have read "The Death of Halpin Frayser" many times, always with interest, always with nagging doubts. Having read the story again today, I feel that it never quite works.

Believe me, I wish I could say otherwise. I agree with H. E. Bates, who, in THE MODERN SHORT STORY: A CRITICAL SURVEY (1941), praised Ambrose Bierce as one of the founders of modernism in short fiction. As Bates wrote, "Bierce began to shorten the short story; he began to bring to it a sharper, more compressed method: the touch of impressionism."

This radical compression often led to stories with complicated plots being crammed into a few pages. For me, one of the best examples would be "The Moonlit Road," which works because it relies on a series of narratives told in the first person by people who cannot perceive the full scope of what has happened. The story offers bits and pieces of testimony, yet leaves one of the central enigmas unexplained. (Who ran out of the house, that night?) In other hands, this type of story might frustrate, but in the hands of Bierce, it frightens.

In "The Death of Halpin Frayser," the story is told in the third person by an implied author who knows what the characters are thinking and knows what has happened. This makes the delayed resolution of the mystery seem contrived. In "The Moonlit Road," nobody understood what was going on, and this gave the story its power; in contrast, "Halpin Frayser" seems like a failed experiment in withheld information.

Another factor that cripples the story is a narrative method that tells us what to think, instead of prompting us with details that would allow us to form our own opinions. This limitation might be caused by the story's extreme compression, but something more fundamental is at work, here.

In his essay, "Visions of the Night," Bierce recounts a dream that is apparently the basis for "The Death of Halpin Frayser." As in the story, the essay describes a forest that drips with blood, a forest that conceals a terrible secret. In the story, this terrible secret is conveyed only by assurances that it does, in fact, exist:

All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation -- the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth -- that he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and all was as before.

A pile of adjectives offers nothing tangible that might create a mood, but consider, instead, this image from the original dream:

Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All around the tank, between it and the enclosing forest -- a space of perhaps ten feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble -- were dead bodies of men -- a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank, radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offense, and did not affect me....

To repeat myself: I would like to call "The Death of Halpin Frayser" a great story in the same rank as "The Moonlit Road," but the limitations of its narrative techniques, and its failure to match a powerful mood that Bierce crafted with similar elements in "Visions of the Night," make it for me a fascinating yet failed experiement.