ipl-logo

Literary Analysis Of An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

688 Words3 Pages

Literary Analysis: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, written in 1890, is a story about the lengths one will go to escape death, and the vanity of man. Part one of this three part story begins with a gentleman who let himself be tricked by “soldiers of the Federal Army”. He is awaiting his execution for plotting against the Union and attempting to set the bridge on fire. He thinks about his wife and children, all while standing on the edge of a plank on the Owl Creek Bridge, with his hands bound and a noose wrapped firmly around his neck. He dreams up an elaborate escape plan, one that he knows is not only impossible but bound to fail. Part one ends with a Sergeant stepping off the board …show more content…

Peyton momentarily loses consciousness, but is “awakened--ages later, it seemed to him--by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation”. As he hangs from the bridge, he begins to feel all sorts of sensations: “These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.” Miraculously, the rope breaks and his elaborate escape plan from earlier comes to fruition; he is now in the water and can loosen his restraints. He escapes gunfire, cannon blast, and forces himself forward. This entire scene is filled foreshadowing about his actual fate: “His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst…”. Peyton, unable to grasp what is happening, makes an alternate reality in which he escapes and makes it home to his beloved family. Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” plays with many themes, the most important being what lengths man will go to escape death. Peyton went from imagining

Show More
Related

  • The Booker Dialectical Journal

    2094 Words  | 9 Pages

    The two men took a short walk across the perfectly manicured lawn and stopped beneath a large white oak, the thick overhanging canopy of leaves shielding them from the afternoon sun. Perspiration stood out on Booker’s forehead, the damp patches under his arms staining his navy-blue shirt. But his discomfort was more a testament of his pent-up tension rather than a reaction to the mild spring weather. He’d taken the burden of worry to new dizzying heights, his concern for his friend physically churning his stomach. Tom was unpredictable, calm one moment, anxiety-ridden the next, and he’d had no idea how he would react during the burial service.

    Read More

  • Summary: An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

    814 Words  | 4 Pages

    When a federal spy disguised as a confederate soldier tricks Farquhar into risking his life to become the hero he had always dreamed of, Farquhar is put in his unfortunate situation. Farquhar inability to recognize the difference between a federal spy and a confederate soldier leads him to the decision that results in his untimely death. The story itself gives the readers a false sense of hope that Farquhar might actually escape his own death. Palmisano illustrates the author's deception when he writes"Bierce does not overtly inform the reader that Farquhar's escape is a hallucination but expects that the careful reader will realize the impossibility of events described in the final section of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". Bierce expresses his disdain for the deceptive tactics used during the civil war by causing the reader to feel remorse for Farquhar's death.

    Read More

  • An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Essay

    948 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • I M Jumping Off The Bridge Analysis

    404 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the essay “I’m Jumping Off the Bridge,” Kevin Sampsell argues that life has more meaning to it than what is recognizable in order to convince the audience that no matter what feelings one has inside, assuming that there is no one and nothing to live for is not the truth. Sampsell deals with his struggles of depression and harmful thoughts after he meets a man at his job that expresses his feelings and desires to commit suicide by jumping off of a bridge. In this essay, Sampsell uses morose word choices to effectively show insight, heartbreak, and the responsibilities that involve one’s life after death. He is eloquent in his description of pain and desolation and has a rhetorical appeal, oriented around pathos, in his relatability. The reader

    Read More

  • An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Foreshadowing Analysis

    813 Words  | 4 Pages

    The condition he is experiencing could come from the rope snapping his neck and his body is shutting down. He sees stars, hears muffled voices, and loses the feeling in his legs. The foreshadowing of these is the board dropped beneath him, his fall to his death. The vision of stars and muffled voices could be the last few moments of his brain

    Read More

  • Owl Creek Bridge Foreshadowing

    1452 Words  | 6 Pages

    Rogelio Ochoa Freed Period 2 Feb 8, 2023 Perception of Owl Creek Bridge One may see something as they want it to be instead of how it really is. The story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce takes place in Alabama. Peyton Farquhar the protagonist of Beirce’s story is a man who is to be hanged and takes place on Owl Creek Bridge. Farquhar was told that anyone who tried interfering with the railroad construction that was happening on the bridge would be hanged.

    Read More

  • An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Literary Analysis

    971 Words  | 4 Pages

    The soldiers around Peyton before his death can be seen as the personification of death itself, the faceless troops look on with order and cold precision, and Peyton remarks that “gentlemen are not excluded,” implying that just as death does not discriminate, neither do these soldiers. At the time that Peyton is being hung, he creates a fantasy in his mind that he has survived this, even though he is surrounded by these soldiers, by death, which finalizes his fate. Choosing not to accept his death, as many people continue to do even today, in a split second his mind creates a wild vision, that is devised to protect him from the reality of his inescapable death. This vision could have been conjured in the seconds before he truly died, with simple thoughts of escape, or a dream to see his wife and family one last time. But his thoughts do not save him, as death is a reality that must be accepted by all, and he meets his end while still grasping at

    Read More

  • Owl Creek Bridge Symbolism

    473 Words  | 2 Pages

    Literary analysis of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Bierce, the Author of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” about a man who was being hanged, throughout the story Peyton hallucinates and thinks that he has escaped the hanging but in reality he’s dying. Bierce uses symbolism in “ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to foreshadow that Peyton is going to die. There are multiple allusions throughout the story that Bierce used to convey the death of Peyton. Imagery is used throughout the entire story to show that Peyton is hallucinating. Throughout the entire story Bierce uses multiple literary techniques to foreshadow Peyton’s death.

    Read More

  • Hills Like White Elephants Literary Analysis

    1554 Words  | 7 Pages

    Throughout the short story (1), “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway is speaking about a seemingly unwanted pregnancy and a woman’s uneasiness with going through an abortion. However, Hemingway never explicitly says in this work of fiction (2) that it is about abortion or that the woman, Jig, is uncomfortable with it, but uses symbolism (3) to present this to the audience. At the time “Hills like White Elephants” was published, in 1927, abortion was illegal in most places and a very taboo subject that wasn’t to be openly discussed in public. Thus, Hemingway relied greatly upon the use of symbolism to get his message across for this reason as well as the third person narrator (4) that did not give insight into the character’s thoughts within this piece of literature (5) . He uses symbols such as the train station, white hills, the baggage, and the drinks to point towards the underlying internal conflict (6) of Jig’s decision that is being heavily influenced by the American man, who wants Jig to get the abortion.

    Read More

  • Elie Wiesel Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Analysis

    609 Words  | 3 Pages

    His recollections about his experience as a young boy makes the horror real and urgent for the audience: “I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast.” (paragraph 4) The audience’s inevitable emotional response to these memories is one of deep sadness and empathy. The need for action instead of silence in the face of such horror is made even clearer.

    Read More

  • Who Is Krakauer's Argument In Chapter 8

    568 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout chapters 8 and 9, the author showed his bias towards Chris McCandless, which is an act of defiance to his position as an objective journalist, when he attempted to alter the readers’ negative point of view towards Chris by the introduction of different people who had similar experiences and characteristics as him and then making comparison. After reading the previous chapters, the readers have already made their own judgement on Chris, which are probably mostly negative. To address this issue, Krakauer initiates chapter 8 by introducing negative comments and mails not only about Chris but also to him, the author. These will serve as an argument that he will later attempt to disprove while at the same time, still informing the readers about what makes Chris special and unique.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between An Occurrence Down By Owl Creek And The Great Gatsby

    688 Words  | 3 Pages

    He constantly swoops in on her, and ends up realizing that he cannot get to her. The green light that shines so brightly in front of him, was already miles behind him, somewhere in the streets of New york. Also in An Occurrence Down By Owl Creek, While Peyton is getting dragged out of his home to be hanged for betraying the Union Army, he has the wildest dreams of escape. While falling from the platform with a noose around his neck, he dreams of an impossible escape where he dodges all the bullets being fired at him while his surroundings start to look beautifully unreal. By the end of the story, he realizes that he's already dead, and it ends with them telling us that his body is hanging from the platform by Owl Creek.

    Read More

  • The Rocking Horse Winner And An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

    1001 Words  | 5 Pages

    Farquhar gets captured by the Union troops and he realizes that he’s going to die from getting hanged. Meanwhile, the noose is around Farquhar neck and he starts to daydream about the possibility of noose breaking and falling into the creek. He then escapes the Union troops, and finds himself back home where his wife awaits him. As soon as he tries to embrace his wife he is forced back into reality by being hanged.

    Read More

  • Hills Like White Elephant Literary Analysis

    746 Words  | 3 Pages

    By definition a “White Elephant” in literature is a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. In the following short story, the situation that the couple is in can be described as a “White Elephant”. Throughout the story a couple, a Spanish woman and an American man, are sitting at a train station waiting for their train. While there, they decide to talk about the issue at hand, a pregnancy. Jig, the Spanish woman, is eager to keep the unborn child as the American man who is the father is not.

    Read More

  • Comparing The Movie Version Of The Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

    575 Words  | 3 Pages

    Later the man, too, becomes sick with a fever while coughing out of blood, even with such limitations, they still continue with the tough journey. The man then really succumbs just like other who died a long time

    Read More

More about Literary Analysis Of An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

Open Document