ambrose bierce an occurrence at owl creek bridge summary

And these two features of Bierce’s narrative work together: in pulling the metaphorical rug out from under us as readers in that devastating final paragraph, we are forced to confront the ugly truth of war, where life is cheap and thousands of men like Farquhar, including civilians, are killed. So we might view ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ as both an innovative piece of short fiction and as an anti-war story. Instead, the romantic, dreamlike sequence in which Farquhar cheats his fate and survives the hanging is suddenly cut off, much as Farquhar’s own life is quickly cut short, only to be replaced by the cold, hard reality of war: death, swift and final. The story shows the reader that the perception of dignity provides no mitigation for the deaths that. Nobody can go through such an experience (at least, not the dying part) and live to tell the tale, of course, but Bierce’s attention to small details paints a plausible picture of what it might feel like to be on the verge of death.īut why go to such lengths to give us a detailed description of Farquhar’s last thoughts, his unconscious delusion or hallucination that he has escaped from the noose and re-joined his family? Bierce was himself a Civil War veteran (he was almost fifty when he wrote ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’), and he was doubtless familiar with many other narratives which sought to glorify or romanticise war. The story explores the concept of dying with dignity. What if a man knows he is to be hanged in a few moments? Bierce’s story attempts to describe, in detail, what it might feel like to be just seconds away from one’s own death, as well as the experience of dying itself. The eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson once observed that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. But what lifts Bierce’s writing to new heights is the sheer length of his description, particularly in the third section of ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’.

We find similar moments in the works of Poe and Dickens: the latter’s description of Fagin’s worried mind as he waits to be sentenced to hanging at the end of Oliver Twist would make for an interesting comparative analysis between Bierce’s story and Dickens’s description of the psychology of a condemned man.

Ambrose bierce an occurrence at owl creek bridge summary