Ambrose Bierce's Beyond the Wall, Explained: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
Obviously influenced by Poe’s “House of Usher,” “Beyond the Wall” doesn’t carry nearly the same weight but cannot be denied its status as a classic American ghost story. What it does share are Gothic atmospherics, a delightfully campy protagonist (both are eccentric blue-bloods living in isolation in gloomy quarters), and a relationship with a frail woman whose decent into the tomb doesn’t put an end to their correspondence.
While Poe’s antihero refused his sister and silently ignored her struggles in the grave, Bierce’s cold-hearted aristocrat turns away from a beautiful stranger’s attempts to make contact with him.
SUMMARY
The story follows an unnamed narrator who, after many prosperous years in the Orient, returns to San Francisco and decides to visit his old schoolmate, Mohun Dampier.
Once handsome, scholarly, wealthy, and independent, Dampier had always possessed a fascination with occult subjects while remaining sufficiently rational to distinguish speculation from certainty. The narrator remembers him as a man who could “make daring incursions into the realm of the unreal” without completely abandoning reason.
The narrator visits Dampier on a violent, rainy night at an isolated house near the ocean. The gloomy surroundings immediately create an unsettling atmosphere. Dampier himself has changed dramatically: although only middle-aged, he is thin, stooped, prematurely gray, extremely pale, and has unnaturally intense eyes.
During their conversation, he acknowledges the change, telling his friend, “You are disappointed in me—non sum qualis eram” [meaning, "I am not what I used to be"]. His remarks repeatedly suggest that he expects death and may soon enter another existence.
During the visit, the narrator hears a gentle tapping apparently coming from the wall behind him. Dampier insists that no one is there and even opens the window to demonstrate that the exterior wall is completely empty. Nevertheless, the tapping returns.
The incident deeply unsettles the narrator, particularly because Dampier seems to regard it as meaningful. Dampier then asks his friend to remain and explains that he has heard the same mysterious signal twice before. He begins telling the story behind it.
Ten years earlier, Dampier lived in a modest apartment on Rincon Hill. One day he saw a beautiful young woman entering the neighboring house. He is overwhelmed by her appearance, describing her as possessing a beauty so extraordinary that he instinctively removed his hat “as a devout Catholic or well-bred Protestant uncovers before an image of the Blessed Virgin.”
He soon becomes completely infatuated with her, repeatedly encountering her but never speaking to her.
Dampier’s social prejudices and sentimental nature prevent him from pursuing an ordinary relationship. He considers himself an aristocrat and learns that the woman is an orphan living as a dependent relative in a boarding house.
Although he loves her, he believes that marrying her would violate his family’s traditions and force him into a life beneath his social position. More importantly, he idealizes her from a distance and fears that ordinary acquaintance would destroy the perfect image he has created. “Love is a delicious dream,” he reasons; “why should I bring about my own awakening?”
Eventually, he learns that the young woman’s bedroom adjoins his own, separated only by a wall. Acting impulsively, he taps on the wall. At first there is no response, but later he hears three taps in return. This develops into a secret means of communication. For several evenings they exchange the same simple signal, making Dampier “deliriously happy,” even though he continues refusing to meet her directly.
Eventually the signals cease. Dampier assumes that the woman has become frustrated by his refusal to approach her and decides that he must finally seek her out. However, he cannot find her anywhere. He later discovers the terrible truth from his landlady: the young woman has been ill for weeks and has died. Dampier realizes that the final tapping he heard was made while she was dying.
After awakening from delirium, she had asked to have her bed moved to the opposite side of the room, toward the wall separating them. Her last effort had apparently been an attempt to restore their mysterious connection.
Overcome by guilt, Dampier wonders what kind of spiritual reparation could be made for having ignored her final attempt to communicate. Years later, he believes that her spirit has returned three times through the same tapping.
The first visitation he investigated skeptically, the second he answered without receiving a response, and the third occurs during the narrator’s visit. He considers this recurrence a “fatal triad” -- an ominous sequence of three omens which are poised to culminate in a catastrophe -- and concludes that there is nothing more to tell.
The narrator, moved by Dampier’s sorrow and remorse, offers no questions or judgment. He simply takes his leave with a gesture of sympathy. Dampier remains behind, alone with his memories and guilt, and the story ends by stating that he “passed into the Unknown.”
ANALYSIS
Although “Beyond the Wall” has been rightfully criticized as being both a disappointingly bland pastiche of Poe’s “Usher” and a “lackluster” reworking of “The Middle-Toe on the Right Foot” (both of which involve a woman’s supernatural revenge being signaled by a telltale manifestation), it is unfair to call the story unimaginative, and inaccurate to accuse it of lacking a disturbing quality.
The ending, certainly, could have been better managed, but the atmosphere, characters, and simple love-story-turned-ghostly are strangely memorable. The best word to describe the story is “bleak.” Indeed, some critics have pointed to Bierce’s characterization of San Francisco as a dreary, rainy, fog-bloated harbor of horrors as one of the first instances of the San Francisco Noir genre that would be popularized in films like “The Maltese Falcon,” “Dark Passage,” and “Vertigo.”
Although the story was unlikely to impress Lovecraft (who always seemed to have a prejudice against ghost stories), he used the title in his haunting tale of lucid dreaming gone awry, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” Indeed, it is probably the fact that we never see who or what is actually knocking at Mahun’s door which prevents the story from being as forgettable as some critics would have it.
Like W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” M. R. James’ “Number 13,” and Bierce’s own “Visions of the Night,” the story’s chilling power come from never actually seeing the ghost or learning its motives. All we know is that shortly after the narrator left Mahun in his gloomy turret, something must have knocked again, and this time found its way inside…