210 Bierce, Ambrose
follows Farquhar’s inner life during the split second
it takes for him to drop from the bridge to his death:
“[A]s one already dead,” Farquhar imagines an elab-
orate escape in psychedelic detail—falling into the
water below as the rope snaps, eluding gunfire, and
struggling for a day through dense woods to return
to his home and his wife. Despite strong hints that
this “escape” is all a delusion, Bierce’s brutal closing
sentence can still shock and surprise a first-time
reader: “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a
broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath
the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.”
Bierce’s story dramatizes a ceremonial military
execution by imagining both the outward trappings
and inward details of such a death, allowing a reader
to envision the action while following the thoughts
of the dying person. The story is an example of a
realistic subgenre that uses omniscience (and never
a first-person narrator) to show the last thoughts
of a dying character; Bierce’s variant of this nar-
rative mode reveals a unique, nearly posthumous
view of inner life that even postdates the thought
process itself: The narrator reports that after “[t]he
intellectual part of his nature was already effaced,”
Farquhar nonetheless still “knew that the rope had
broken” and, in defiance of logic, could fabricate his
own escape in protracted detail. As Bierce’s closing
sentence shows, these postmortem “thoughts” prove
delusional—cruel, self-preserving hallucinations
induced by terminal stress. It is commonplace to
imagine that at the split second of death, one’s whole
life may rerun itself in the mind, but Bierce turns
the dying man’s last, instantaneous vision into an
imagined escape from death itself, forward-looking
rather than retrospective. Farquhar’s dying brain
even weaves the horrible pains of hanging into the
tapestry of its last fantasy.
Though Bierce himself had been a Union sol-
dier, the story stays politically neutral even while
encouraging sympathy for the dying Rebel. As the
protagonist and focal figure, Farquhar is fully human
and three-dimensional; by contrast, his antagonists
stay undifferentiated and mechanical, mere agents
of military protocol. Further, Farquhar is a young,
handsome, respectable gentleman who is loyal,
heroic, and victimized. These aspects tend to make
readers care for him and empathize with the agony
of his final moments.
Bierce laces his rendering of Farquhar’s death
with verbal and situational ironies that verge on
dark wit. Verbal irony occurs, for example, when
Bierce’s sarcastic narrator calls the military code
of justice “liberal” for not excluding “gentlemen”
from hanging—and also when the understated title
calls Farquhar’s execution “an occurrence,” imply-
ing something ordinary. Meanwhile, complex situ-
ational ironies convey Bierce’s own cynical view of
things: Military men act with punctilious decorum
while committing a brutal act, executing a man who
believes he is escaping death even during his dying
moment. Such ironies are compelling enough that a
first-time reader may believe Farquhar’s delusion to
be the real thing.
Farquhar is a symbol of the planter class, and
his futile, self-deluding doom mirrors the larger
outcomes of the war, which the South lost. Viewed
somewhat differently, his death personalizes the
hideous fraternal slaughter that killed thousands
of valiant men on both sides, North and South.
Layered under the veneer of military ceremony in
the story lies the internal violence of a brutal death
that only fiction can allow an outside witness to
experience.
As naturalistic realism, Bierce’s story shows no
glory in such a death and registers no mitigating
hope that an afterlife might ease or justify such
terminal suffering. Bierce’s narrator resists moraliz-
ing but does remark that, according to military eti-
quette, death always evokes “silence and fixity,” quiet
respect, even when one side inflicts it ritualistically
on the other. Overall, the story treats death in war
as brutally painful, its suffering compounded in this
particular case by the victim’s futile efforts to wish
it away and by the ceremonial indifference of those
who carry it out.
Roy Neil GravesHOpe in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge”
A poem by Emily Dickinson starts, “ ‘Hope’ is the
thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—/
And sings the tune without the words—/ And never
stops—at all—.” The ending section of Ambrose