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“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Literary Analysis
In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, a Confederate sympathizer, Peyton Farquhar, is sent to his execution by hanging for disclosing his vigilante tendencies to a disguised Union soldier. Bierce presents the story in three sections. In the first, Farquhar is standing on the bridge over Owl Creek awaiting his execution. The second gives us a backstory of how he ended up in this predicament, and the third section begins with his fall from the bridge. While writing about a man hoping to elude death, Bierce reflects on his ideas of perception, of consciousness, and the manifestations of human emotions when faced with death through phenomena such as the primal human aversion to death and wish-fulfillment.
Although death is inescapable, humans naturally have a primal aversion to death. A type of awareness one may have of his or her inevitable death is the ritual drama of mutual pretense. Lars Sandman defines this type of awareness as when the human and all parties related know the patient is about to die “but pretend they do not know and hence act as if this were not the case” (Sandman 92). Bierce alludes to this human phenomenon in the first section of his story when he says of the perpetrator, “He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift – all had distracted him” (Bierce 2). Even though this mindset was fleeting for Farquhar, Bierce touches on the psychology of the human reaction when facing sure death. Once Farquhar’s thoughts returned to that of his imminent death, his perception of reality becomes skewed due to the severity of his situation. This phenomenon is evident by his heightened perception of the ticking of his watch. Bierce described the ticking as sharp, distinct, and ringing; Farquhar could not measure the distance of the sharp, maddening strokes and feared he would shriek (Bierce 2). In his work, Bierce uses this death awareness reaction and perceptive shift to give credulity to Farquhar’s actions.
Another psychological event brought to light by this story is the dream-like state that Farquhar slips into after his fall. Peter Morrone believes Farquhar “masks his terror by escaping into a Freudian wish-fulfillment dream state” (Morrone 310). According to Stoicheff, “Farquhar imagines his escape in the brief interval between the removal of the plank that supports him and his actual death by hanging” (Stoicheff 349). This is one example of the manifestations of the human emotion of fear as well as hope. In Farquhar’s dream-like state, he escapes death – the root of his fear in the story and the subject of his hope. In the final section of Bierce’s work, Farquhar escapes his death by hanging but is still being taken over by manifestations of his fear as alternate pathways to his death in his dream state. After a moment of initial relief, when Farquhar rises to the surface of the stream, he is confronted by death in the form of drowning and gunfire. He says, “To be hanged and drowned that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. That is not fair” (Bierce 3). Bierce uses the emotion of fear, one all humans can empathize with, to give merit to Farquhar’s behavior.
As Farquhar returns home in his dream, readers are given insight to his internal conflicts. It is evident by his desires to help the Confederate cause that Farquhar wishes for the life and glory of a soldier. It seems that he sees himself as such a soldier in the last section when he is dodging gunfire and predicting the next moves of the Union troops – skills of a soldier that we know he did not have after revealing his plans to a Union spy. Once out of danger’s way, Bierce describes the rest of Farquhar’s dream as glorious. Perhaps this is how Farquhar imagined his life would be if he was the soldier in real life that he was in his dream-like state. Bierce describes the home he returns to as “bright and beautiful” and his wife as “looking fresh and cool and sweet.” She waits for him in front of his grandiose home “with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity” (Bierce 6). Bierce uses this imagery to help the reader understand that Farquhar felt unfulfilled as a mediocre Confederate vigilante. Feeling unfulfilled is another communal human experience, thus as readers, we are inclined to sympathize with Farquhar and perceive him as being even more human. Because Bierce gives Farquhar such undeniably typical human behavior, his death may have a greater impact on the reader.
Exploring universal human behavior and reactions in his work, Bierce establishes a good rapport between Farquhar and the reader. Although most readers have not stared death in the face, because the desires and emotions Farquhar expresses seem to be in line with what we think of as characteristic human behavior, Bierce is able to get the reader to empathize with Farquhar. Farquhar made a moral choice and was forced to deal with the consequences; something all humans are faced with whether the consequences are bad as in Farquhar’s case or good. The realization that Farquhar did not live up to the life he wished for himself invokes a small amount of fear of the same type in the reader, causing this story to have a deeper impact on the reader than just to entertain. Bierce’s work has a lasting impression on the readers because his protagonist’s psychological experiences are comparable to those the readers themselves have had.
Works Cited
Bierce, Ambrose. “A Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” San Francisco Examiner. 13 July 1980. Web. 1 July 2016.
Morrone, Peter J. “Disciplinary Conditioning and Self Surveillance in Ambrose Bierce’s War Fiction.” The Midwest Quarterly 54.3 (2013): 310+. General One File. Web. 1 July 2016.
Sandman, Lars. "Awareness of Death in Open and Closed Contexts."Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience.Eds. Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck. Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009. 93-94.SAGE Knowledge. Web. 1 July 2016.
Stoicheff, Peter. “Something Uncanny’: The Dream Structure in Abrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Studies in Short Fiction. 22 June 1993. Web. 1 July 2016