Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, he discusses the cryptic aspects of "The Boarded Window" and examines its treatment of reclusiveness.

In her 1984 study, The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce, Cathy Davidson says that some of Bierce's stories create a sense of "perceptual confusion" in the characters or the readers or both. There is a sense of mystery or "indeterminacy," sometimes with two different views of events being presented, so that it is hard to know what actually happened. Or, as in a story like "The Death of Halpin Frayser," everything is so uncertain that the reader is left utterly baffled.

Bierce's point in creating such bafflement may be to suggest that the world is a mysterious place that cannot be fully understood, and this may be what he is...