An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Comparison Essay

Finding out the differences within the similarities
Ambrose Bierce’s short story ‘An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and “Mark on the Wall’ by Virginia Woolf show similarities and differences between each other.
Three similarities can be shown between the two short stories of ‘An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and ‘Mark on the Wall’. The first similarity is the background settings. Both have a setting of a war, as written “wartime” and “God damn this war!” on each passage. Besides the two stories share the same background of the “war”, how the geographical backgrounds, where the stories are plotting, is not changing from the beginning to the end is also similar. This is to say, the characters are actually in the same spot from beginning to the end, but what is changing and moving is all happened in the imagination or in the internal mind. For example, on the book ‘an Occurrence at the Owl Creek Bridge’, the story starts with the scene that the main character, Peyton Farquhar, is standing upon a bridge, and the first scene of ‘mark on the wall’ also starts with depicting the character seeing the “mark on the wall”. After this first scene at this geographical location, it seems

On Bierce’s work, the last scene shows that Peyton Farquhar was actually dead that “his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge”, and on the Woolf’s work, someone’s voice which looks like that of her husband, let her come back to the reality out of her own world of thinking. To the readers, who might believe that Farquhar is survived, the ending is a big shock as the vivid descriptions of each moment describe as if he is alive! Also, the ending of the ‘Mark on the wall’ is also somewhat shocking that it pulls down the readers who are staying together with the character within her flows of thoughts which range from God, nature, even to the humanity, but in fact it was just a