"An Occurrence at Owl Creek"

Just like with Robert E. Lee’s “Letter to his Son,” I thoroughly enjoyed “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge;” more than I initially thought I would. Not only do I think that it is a very interesting story in and of itself, but it is also a story told in a very original and unique way. Whether the story is flashing back in the second part or whether the first and third parts are flash forwards from the time of the second part, it kept me reading closely until the very end. It came as a slight surprise at the end to find out that from the moment that he thought that the noose broke and he succeeded in escaping his executioners, he was really just imagining the entire thing while he was still suffocating at the end of the noose in reality.

Peyton Farquhar is a simple man living in the South that wants to be a soldier, but even though he is not, he still tries to help the Southern cause any way he possibly can. When he is presented the opportunity to help destroy a bridge to slow the Union’s advances, he jumps at the chance. The reader finds out a few lines after the “Confederate” soldier leaves that it was actually a Union spy that was setting him up; and since the spy only went back to the North after a couple of hours, I would assume that he also set up some other people, so it is possible that Farquhar is not the only one being executed that day. Also, the fact that the Union soldiers have such a methodical system of hanging people on this bridge shows that they have probably done this multiple times. The point about the soldiers being very methodical and robot like sounds very similar to me to the philosophy to Thoreau because in Civil Disobedience, he talks about how soldiers are basically just pawns in the governments hands; they really aren’t human anymore, just tools to do the governments bidding.

Bierce, Ambrose. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. 389-396. Print.