Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
allows access into the soul of the protagonist, Peyton
Farquhar, and shows there an undiminished hope
for survival and escape still fluttering away in his
consciousness under the stress of certain death by
hanging at the hands of Union troops during the
American Civil War. Farquhar, a young Alabama
planter and loyal Southerner, has tried to burn down
a railroad bridge that is strategic to the campaign of
federal troops as they subdue the rebellious South.
Earlier, a Union soldier in disguise had visited the
Farquhar plantation 30 miles away from the bridge
and effectively tricked him into trying to burn it
down. The visitor had explained that any civilians
interfering with the invading Northern army would
“be summarily hanged,” but Farquhar had taken the
chance and been caught. As the story opens, he faces
certain death, poised over Owl Creek with a noose
around his neck while Federal soldiers proceed with
the details of his hanging. Overall, the story shows
that, in the face of certain death, the human instinct
to hope for a miracle can push a man to elaborate
lengths to keep him from confronting the end of
selfhood. Perched in the soul, hope may “sing the
tune” to the very end, a soaring flight of fancy.
By means of an inner monologue, a tour de force
passage that uses stream of consciousness, part 3 of
Bierce’s brief tale allows access into a process that no
one can follow in reality: It shows a man’s optimistic
delusions during the second or so it takes him to fall
to an instantaneous death that breaks his neck and
leaves his body swaying in the breeze. The several
pages of prose that elaborate Farquhar’s thoughts
during this instant make his “escape” seem so real
as to fool a first-time reader into believing that this
“one already dead” is indeed managing to gain his
freedom.
The author’s capacity to trick the reader into
suspending disbelief and following Farquhar on
his hopeful mental journey involves a good bit of
juggling, since the real time of Farquhar’s reverie,
a second or so, does not mesh with the extended
period a reader needs to scan what transpires in
Farquhar’s mind: The instant Farquhar falls, he feels
excruciating pain and suffocation in his throat but
almost immediately activates a capacity for hope-
ful self-deception that causes him to believe the
rope has broken and he has dropped into the water,
escaped a barrage of bullets, scrambled onto the
bank, run for a whole day through tangled woods,
and finally arrived back home to be greeted by his
smiling wife. As this delusion unfolds, Bierce drops
broad hints that this escape is unreal—psychedelic
details, fantastic flora, and mystical details in the
heavens. Nonetheless, a reader may still buy into the
fantasy of the protagonist’s trip home, only to have
all hopes dashed when the author reports Farquhar’s
death in the last sentence.
One effect of Bierce’s story is to call all foolish
hopes into question—Farquhar’s, but also the read-
er’s. All humans will die, despite their own elaborate
efforts to fool themselves into thinking they are
invulnerable. Some, like Farquhar, will die cruel
deaths sanctioned by military ceremony and proto-
col. The cynical tone of the story enforces a realistic
view by making a reader participate in the fool’s
journey of false hope. Though Farquhar’s death is
individual, it symbolizes that of his homeland, the
South, deluding itself into believing it can escape its
inevitable doom.
As an example of naturalism, a mode of pes-
simistic realism that pervaded prose fiction before
1900, this story holds out no false hope, either in this
life or the next. Here, no heroism and no heaven
assuage a lonely and torturous end. By downplaying
Farquhar’s death as “an occurrence,” even Bierce’s
title underscores the view that human actions look
trivial in an uncaring cosmos, with death just an
insignificant aspect of the universal routine. In the
microcosm of the story, military guiles and ceremo-
nies preempt humane considerations, and ironic
outcomes leave no room for people of any social
class to exercise positive thinking as a means of
overcoming destiny. Still, futile hope may persist in
the human mind until the bitter end.
Roy Neil GravesisOlatiOn in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge”
In the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge,” the theme of isolation pervades a situa-
tion that Ambrose Bierce brings to life through a
combination of external description and internal
monologue (or stream of consciousness) as the pro-“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” 211