Week 5 Analysis: Literary Analysis on "Moxon's Master"

In my literary analysis I would like to discuss the story "Moxon's Master" by Ambrose Bierce and the character of Moxon and his seemingly extreme views on life and intellect. In addition to this, I will elaborate how the situation and setting makes it so the narrator is unreliable and how the story itself, in turn, becomes unreliable too. On a brief side note, I'd also like to contrast this with Haley and the theme of conspiracy.

In "Moxon's Master", we first are introduced into a scene where two characters, Moxon and our narrator, are in an intellectual conversation about the definition of life and intellect in Moxon's machine shop. It is here we find Moxon's odd perspective of "life". He thinks that all things, to some degree have intellect. He uses personification to prove his point. "What does a plant think-in the absence of a brain?" (236) He then goes to explain how plants will bend to entice a bee for pollination, and how vines maneuver to reach stable objects to grow upon. He then continues to give other examples such as "Wild geese in flight take the form of a letter V......[and] atoms arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect" (237) After further irritation from our narrator we find then that Moxon also considers machines to be filled with life and intellect. This justified form of personification, I learned later, is called panpsychism.

It is because of this conversation, that the narrator's opinion of Moxon is rancorous. He thinks that he has gone mad due to insomnia, but it is because of his curiosity that he is drawn back to the machine shop, where we learn that Moxon meets his "master"- hence the title of the work. Moxon gets murdered by, as the narrator describes, a machine, or automaton, whom becomes wrathful after losing a game of chess. The narrator passes out and awakes later in a hospital with Moxon's colleague Haley, who says that he saved him/her (narrator unspecified) from the workshop fire and question's the narrators memory of the incident.

In analysis of this, we have to consider the narrators story. Not only did he/she say that the setting wasn't well lit "a single candle made all the light that was in the room"(240), but we may also have to assume that the narrator himself may not be in his right mind. During this time, it wasn't uncommon to drink among friends, especially during intellectual conversation. Being under the influence could justify how easily it was for him to get antagonized as well as justify why he had fainted. Because of this, we have to assume that the narrator is unreliable, and that his story too, as illusory as it seems, is also hard to trust or believe. The narrator even admits that "if asked today [he/she] should answer less confidently" (243).

But maybe, the narrator wasn't unreliable after all. The only one thing that made the narrator question his own judgement was a comment from Haley. Haley somewhat mocked the narrator by asking if he really saw what he did that night of Moxon's death. What if the narrator DID see what he claimed to see? Then perhaps Haley was trying to keep Moxon's self-thinking and self-acting machine for himself. Or perhaps, maybe the author didn't see an automaton.. What if Haley was the one who had killed Moxon, after all, it was said only Haley and the machines allowed in that particular room.

I think Bierce is keeping details miniscule to not only keep it interesting for the reader by leaving a lot to imagination, but to also make the story a mystery that is near-impossible to solve. I think as well, that he also uses the unrealistic monstrous creation, and possible cover-up by Haley, to highlight the idea of corruption and conspiracy. After all, Bierce was an investigative reporter who looked into railroad corruption and disappeared mysteriously in 1914. Maybe he was eluding upon how people's self interest can cause them to act monstrously.


Works Cited:
Bierce, Ambrose. “Moxon's Master.” The Literature of California, edited by Jack Hicks, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 235-243.