A flashback in the story reveals that a Union soldier disguised as a Confederate soldier lures Farquhar to demolish the bridge, but Farquhar is caught in the act. When Farquhar is hanged, the rope breaks, he escaped, and runs home to his beautiful wife and children. At the end, it is revealed that Farquhar never escaped and imagined everything between falling off the bridge and his last breath. Farquhar imagined a several hour event in a matter of seconds. How can someone visualize a non-realistic event in such a short period of time?
How would he feel if he never saw his family again? Again, yet did he suspect that he would never get to hold his wife or children again? “As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it.” This was one of the last thoughts he had running through his mind. As he is telling the story all these thoughts are circulating through his mind. With him saying this and him pondering about this, it sets some of the voice for Peyton and/or other characters.
The story starts out describing a man (Farquhar) on a bridge, wrists bound, and noose around his neck. Farquhar is on a loose platform, laid over train tracks, and expecting to be executed in the coming moments. There is a small squad of individuals surrounding Farquhar, in full military attire, awaiting the order to begin the execution. It is at this time that Farquhar imagines escaping the execution, and returning to the safety of his home (Bierce 300). Peyton Farquhar is a successful Alabama planter, who finds; himself, his wife, and his property very close to the front lines of the Union advancement into the Confederate controlled Southern states.
Eric D. Gross Professor Duenas English 104 – Narrative Essay 7 November 2011 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Life in the Blink of an Eye If you found yourself about to be executed, how would you respond? Would you beg for your life? Would you resist defiantly until the very end? In Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar is a man standing in the face of his own mortality, about to be hung from the very bridge he attempted to destroy. Bierce’s narrative continually interweaves the present to the past and back to the present, leading the reader into a state somewhere between dream and reality.
In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce reveals the tensions driven by fear of death. With descriptive setting, dramatic tone change, and significant symbolism, Bierce shows how Farquhar creates his own reality to calm his fear of his death by execution. In the setting of, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Bierce takes the reader on a journey through the mind and viewpoint of a man awaiting his inevitable execution. Thankfully, Bierce’s short story is divided into three parts. In part I Peyton Farquhar is standing on a bridge, above a body of water waiting to be hanged and in the midst of infantrymen, Peyton is trying to soothe the fear of his impending doom.
And then the surprising one when you think he is safe back at home, but oh no, he is dead beneath the bridge. I think this is a Short story Genre. I feel the Narrator is a non-participant in this particular short story. I think this was written in the 3rd person Omniscient Point of View. Narrator knows what all the character are thinking and speaking for them.
The author, Ambrose Bierce, of the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” captured the thoughts or more appropriately the hallucinations of a man during the fleeting moments of dying or that brief threshold between life and death. Peyton Farquhar is the man being hanged and is described as a Southern gentleman. The reader easily relates to this man and his plight. The reader sympathizes with the character and probably considers his hanging as unfair. The setting of the story takes place during the Civil War and thus, gives vivid descriptions of the military setting, military time and the military execution.
Bierce uses subtle instances of foreshadowing in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to gesture to the gap between reality and illusion that widens throughout the story. Bierce’s story hinges heavily on the unexpected final revelation—that Farquhar, far from escaping, has actually been hanged. Although Bierce intends the unexpected ending to startle the readers’ assumptions, he peppers his story with various clues to signal in advance the unreliable and completely fantastical nature of the concluding section. For example, the description of the soldiers’ weapons in the first section—with the company of infantrymen holding their guns at “parade rest” with the butts to the ground and the commanding officer standing with the point of his sword also to the ground—stands in stark contrast to the rounds fired and volley of shots lobbied at Farquhar during his imagined escape. The weapons are in truth merely ceremonial and harmless, and Farquhar is and remains in the company’s custody throughout.
There was very little to no conversations in this story, which definitely makes it a third person narrator. The ending was quite a surprise to me because I didn’t quite understand the story too much. It was one of those stories where you had to sit back and rethink about what you just read and piecing it all together in your head. Overall, I didn’t really like this short story too much, I guess I am more into stories with verbal communications rather than the descriptive story because it made it harder for me to see how the main character was
In this journey Everyman finds that not one of his friends are willing to stick with him to the end. He discovers that many will promise to stand by him and make this journey but in the end only one will honor his promise and complete the journey. All betray Everyman during his journey to his death one by one in succession. At the time of death Everyman is left with only his good deeds. The point that the author tries to get across is that Everyman is You.