The genre aspect of Ambrose Bierce's military prose

The article deals with the early prose of Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), one of the most distinctive American writers of the second half of the 19th century, journalist and the Civil War veteran. The aim of this work is to reveal the genre features of the writer’s war stories. The research is based on the collection “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians”, published in 1891. In Bierce’s military prose, the author discloses the features typical of a short story. The problem of differentiating between small forms, such as novella, story, short story, etc., is also discussed. The elements of a parable in the writer’s works are studied, revealing the main attributes of parable, as well as the features of its modern variety. The detailed research of the two plans of meaning that interacts on the level of characters’ system is made. It is established that in Bierce’s works, each character represents either the first or the allegorical plan of meaning. Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas (for the first plan characters) and Stoicism (for allegorical characters) are defined as the basis of character’s worldview. The analysis shows that Bierce’s works belong to the genre of a short story and genetically ascend to a parable. The relevance of this research come from a necessity to examine the genre as a specific issue of the writer’s stories. The scientific novelty of the research is to consider the parabolic origin in Bierce’s short stories about the Civil War as a meaningful aspect of his prose.