Peyton Farquhar dies soon after the end of section I but we only learn it at the end of section III. The end of Section III brings us back to the present, at the hanging. “ As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon--then all is darkness and silence!”. At this very last moments, he cries out for his wife and we realize that he will never say goodbye to her. What really happened is that the rope did not break.
Bierce, begins this story with much detail. Farquhar, a Southern gentleman who was not a rebel soldier but nonetheless a slave owner and rebel sympathizer, is standing on Owl Creek Bridge, about to be hanged. A brief flashback enlightens the reader as to why. Farquhar, having been visited by a Union soldier in disguise, was lured into trying to sabotage the bridge. After the flashback, the hanging commences.
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?
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.
The story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, takes place during the Civil War in the southern United States. In the opening paragraph, the main character, Peyton Farquhar, a young slave owner and rebel sympathizer, is standing on Owl Creek Bridge, about to be hanged. The story then goes into a brief flashback to enlighten the reader on how the man go in this predicament. Farquhar, having been visited by a Union soldier in disguise, was lured into trying to sabotage the bridge in which they were planning to cross. After the flashback, the hanging commences and as Farquhar begins to fall, the grave sensation of his death is described.
Bierce is showing that the story takes place during the Civil War, which shows that execution was used a lot during this time. Farquhar begins to look at the stream below him and a piece of driftwood catches his eye; he watches it flow slowly down the current. Rena Korb in Short Stories for Students states, “ Bierce…shows Farquhar’s distortion of time in an effort to fend off death”(Korb 169). He is saying that Farquhar begins to look at things and see them slower than they really are because he is trying to distract himself from what is about to happen. Then, Farquhar closes his eyes and begins to think about his family, but is disturbed by the ticking sound of his watch.
Narrator knows what all the character are thinking and speaking for them. Plot: Peyton is standing on a plank of a bridge with a noose around his neck going to be hanged. The military are about to carry out the hanging by stepping off the plank to where Peyton will drop and thus be hung. All of a sudden, Peyton feels the sudden tightening of the noose, gasping for air. At this point the suspense is really building, the rope breaks, he falls into the water.
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.
Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a story told in limited third person. Bierce used this to tell what Peyton Farquhar was thinking. In the story, it talks about how Farquhar gets away and he makes it to his house at dusk. But in reality “Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.” This all happens in a couple of seconds. If it had shown that it all lasted a few seconds from the beginning there would not have been a story.