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An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Essay

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How do you cope with the reality of day to day life? I would like to think I handle the reality of day to day life moderately well like everyone else. However, I began to question myself once again as I read Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This story, with its unexpected ending, had me rereading it several times to pull out key details that led me down the wrong path the first time. 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. Farquhar, loyal to the …show more content…

The story is written in a way that makes you believe the main character is alive and free, but in reality you are reading the last wishes of a dead man. The ending definitely caught me by surprise due to author’s efforts in playing with the main character’s point of view. I think the author also performed well with descriptive words as I could paint the scenes in my head like the, “...whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration which made him giddy and sick” and “...the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel...” (Bierce 604). The use of this imagery also helped the author convey the illusion of fantasy and

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Foreshadowing in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” A dead man swings back and forth on the Owl Creek Bridge. The short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce depicts Peyton Farquhar about to get hung, when his mind begins to take over the story. The true ending is revealed in the story through foreshadowing.

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Did Peyton Farquhar only commit the convicted crime of destroying government property or were his intentions more malicious than that? Was Farquhar tampering without authorization with government property to affect the war and to counteract the Federal Army, just so he could feel like a hero and aid the South? Ronald Reagan once stated, “We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” That is exactly what I intend to do with Peyton Farquhar, make him accountable for his quilty actions.

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Often regarded as one of the more significant short stories in American literature, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce takes place during the Civil War and is about a secessionist young southerner named Peyton Farquhar. Farquhar is a prideful and fallible young man who desires to help the Confederacy, but for some undisclosed reason is not able to serve. He attempts to blow up a bridge controlled by Union soldiers, and is subsequently hanged. Ambrose Bierce designed this short story to keep the reader’s attention throughout, going into the mind of Farquhar, and he holds their attention through use of vivid imagery, realism, narrative structure, and foreshadowing. Throughout the story, Bierce uses foreshadowing to indicate

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