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An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Essay

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How do you cope with the reality of day to day life? I would like to think I handle the reality of day to day life moderately well like everyone else. However, I began to question myself once again as I read Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This story, with its unexpected ending, had me rereading it several times to pull out key details that led me down the wrong path the first time. As you can tell from the title, something big happened at the Owl Creek Bridge, but you have to wait until the end of the story to find out the truth, or else you could be lost in someone’s daydream. The story had me intrigued by the different directions it could take you, but it all made sense in the end, and I discovered you sometimes have to dig a little deeper to find the whole truth about someone. Peyton Farquhar, a plantation owner in his mid-thirties, is being prepared for execution by hanging from an Alabama railroad bridge during the American Civil War. Farquhar, a supporter of the Confederacy, learns from a soldier that Union troops have seized the Owl Creek railroad bridge and repaired it. The soldier suggests that Farquhar might be able to burn the bridge down if he can slip past its guards. Farquhar, loyal to the …show more content…

The story is written in a way that makes you believe the main character is alive and free, but in reality you are reading the last wishes of a dead man. The ending definitely caught me by surprise due to author’s efforts in playing with the main character’s point of view. I think the author also performed well with descriptive words as I could paint the scenes in my head like the, “...whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration which made him giddy and sick” and “...the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel...” (Bierce 604). The use of this imagery also helped the author convey the illusion of fantasy and

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