The Boarded Window

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1891

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Literary Devices

Mood Setting

“The Boarded Window” begins and ends in “an immense and almost unbroken forest” (Paragraph 1). Forests are the home of deep shadow, predators and, perhaps, even more mysterious and dangerous forces. By setting his story here, in a lonely decrepit cabin in the middle of forbidding woods, Bierce creates a somber, eerie mood and a sense of foreboding.

The cabin’s boarded window immediately lets readers know that something has gone wrong: Something has clearly invaded or otherwise assailed the cabin, and its inhabitant has not been able to fully fix the damage. We also see that nature has started to reclaim this ostensible human outpost: Bushes grow in the clearing and. This adds to the sense of mystery and uncertainty, increasing the story’s tension.

The cabin’s inhabitant, a taciturn prematurely wizened old man named Murlock, has given up: “the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes” (Paragraph 1). His neighbors know little about him, which makes his presence unsettling. His silence, premature aging, and sudden death add to the mystery—something no one can unravel since they knew neither him nor his long-dead wife.

Finally, Bierce adds a layer of supernatural horror to the already unpleasant atmosphere. The narrator clearly finds the cabin spooky and used to believe it was haunted: As a lad, he tossed a stone at the cabin and then ran away out of fear that he had awakened a ghost rumored to live there. These strange details foreshadow the unsettling story to come.

Building up Suspense

Once the darkly mysterious mood is established, the author dials up the tension with a series of small incidents that increase the sense of fear, unease, and unnaturalness. Murlock returns home to find his wife delirious with fever. She fades into stillness and seems to be dead. He doesn’t cry at the loss, but prepares her body for burial and lays it out on the table. Exhausted, he falls asleep only to hear a horrifying cry coming through the window from the forest. The wail hints at outside forces closing in on the cabin. These several incidents in a row—her fever, her catatonia, his emotional confusion and exhaustion, and the sudden, sharp sound from without—ratchet up tension until ordinary life wheels frighteningly out of control.

Fear reaches a fever pitch when Murlock awakens in the dark of night to the sound of footfalls inside the cabin. The table lurches and something falls to the floor with a heavy sound. Murlock reaches across the table for his wife, but her body is gone. These abrupt, isolated sensory inputs add to the confusion and heighten the terror in the dark room. Fear reaches a climax as Murlock grabs his rifle and fires it; the momentary illumination sears onto his eyes the frozen image of a panther with its jaws sunk into the neck of his wife.

Thus, against the gloomy forest background come in quick succession fever, death, darkness, eerie cry, footfalls, lurching attack, and rifle blast, building suspense into foreboding, terror, and finally shock.

Twist Ending

Known for his surprising endings, Ambrose Bierce offers a triple twist to the conclusion of “The Boarded Window”: Murlock’s wife is not dead, she somehow fights off the panther, and she either revived and died for real or became an animated corpse. After this climactic battle, Murlock, must live with the possibility that his inaction caused her actual death—and the grisly joke that by laying out her body on the table, he gave the panther an invitation to dine.

Bierce sets up the twist ending with a clever misdirection: Murlock and the reader assume that his wife is dead. The author slyly telegraphs that this might be a false assumption by giving Murlock a lack of grief and an odd sense that his wife isn’t really gone. The most startling revelation, though, is the discovery that his wife fought savagely against her beastly assailant, to the point of biting off its ear. The shock of this, on top of her tragic “double death,” creates an ending among the most stunning in all of horror fiction.