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An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Analysis Essay

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“An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” Everyone in life needs to think of the good things in life as they go through tough times. Our world always has developing stories on the news about shootings and people dying, and in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” Peyton Farquhar wants to die. Farquhar has a tough life and a job that he doesn’t like. When he finds the bridge, he knows that it is the perfect place to be hung and the bridge is like a stage to do that. So, in the last moments of his life he disconnects himself from his physical body. In “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” Bierce uses the bridge and driftwood to symbolize Peyton’s thoughts and feeling about his death. Bierce uses descriptive language throughout the story to link Farquhar's feelings to what is actually happening. By linking the bridge to Farquhar's death, it helps to describe what Peyton is thinking. In the beginning the figurative language is used to show what was happening to Peyton Farquhar. “His features were good--a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark …show more content…

Just thinking of the thoughts and feelings of death, doesn’t make anyone to happy to think about it. However, death is a part of life that all humans go through and have to get over. This leaves the readers with several questions. Why would someone want to kill themselves? Is it worth it? Would his future would have been better later on, if he would not have killed himself. While readers leave this story seeing how powerful the struggle between life and death can be one must always wonder if it is worth it in the

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was a story written by Ambrose Bierce. He wrote it to be a suspenseful and confusing short story. The suspense brought on by Bierce employed to clench one's attention throughout this short story by using numerous literary techniques. With his use of imagery Bierce displayed that, in his mind, Farquhar, while being hanged, still had all of his thoughts and he believed that he was escaping the army, bringing suspense to the story. Farquhar thought that the rope had snapped and that he had fallen into the water, he imagined himself escaping the military by swimming away.

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Farquhar gets captured by the Union troops and he realizes that he’s going to die from getting hanged. Meanwhile, the noose is around Farquhar neck and he starts to daydream about the possibility of noose breaking and falling into the creek. He then escapes the Union troops, and finds himself back home where his wife awaits him. As soon as he tries to embrace his wife he is forced back into reality by being hanged.

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Rogelio Ochoa Freed Period 2 Feb 8, 2023 Perception of Owl Creek Bridge One may see something as they want it to be instead of how it really is. The story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce takes place in Alabama. Peyton Farquhar the protagonist of Beirce’s story is a man who is to be hanged and takes place on Owl Creek Bridge. Farquhar was told that anyone who tried interfering with the railroad construction that was happening on the bridge would be hanged.

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Farquhar was able to deviate away from the reality of his death through his vivid imagination. He escaped all the pain that he otherwise would have felt. Upon falling down the bridge, his defense mechanism kicked in and led him to imagine an escape he desired. He didn’t feel any pain for he quickly “lost consciousness and was as one already dead.” He was not in fear during his last moments because he believed that “despite his suffering … he now (stood) at the gate of his own home.”

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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.

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In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, a respected Alabama planter and slave-owner, Peyton Farquhar, is being hanged for disobeying an order from the Yanks. The order is to stay away from bridges during a Civil War advance, and Farquhar is conspiring to blow up a bridge. Farquhar’s demise is foreshadowed using several literary techniques, such as preternatural plot elements and imagery. To start, preternatural plot elements are implied to foreshadow Farquhar’s death when he hears the distant sound of something striking a metallic object while he is awaiting his execution.

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Peyton Farquhar in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” also follows a similar fate. The readers of this story, “ wander with [Farquhar] through a field of illusions which become more attractive as [he escapes] the confines of reality” (Folsom). Throughout the story, Farquhar manages to escape death multiple times, from the initial hanging to cannon blasts from Union soldiers. Eventually, Farquhar and the readers are convinced that he escapes until, “[Peyton] feels a stunning blow upon the back if the neck… Then all is darkness the silence” (Bierce).

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Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” revolves around the manipulation of time through the conflict of man versus nature. Bierce uses time in his favor as he switches between the past and the present life of the main character, Peyton Farquhar, as he lives his last moments. He uses this to show how time can be “subjective and phenomenal during times of emotional distress”. (BookRags). The manipulation of time that is unnoticeable whilst reading the story strengthens the themes that are present in this work, such as man’s denial of mortality, and the conjuring of irrational situations.

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Farquhar attempts to escape his death and believes that he found life, but reality catches up to him and he eventually meets death. Bierce parallels this to real life, because countless people create false hope for themselves, but as time moves on, that false hope is proven false and those people are disheartened and disappointed. The bridge is a major symbol in Bierce’s story and has multiple meanings, which help make the story be interpreted more

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Tension Ambrose Bierce creates suspense in his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. By using literary techniques such as story structure, imagery, characterization, time, setting. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is about a man who in the civil war is trying to burn the union bridge but is caught and we see his hanging. The first literary technique that Bierce uses to create suspenses is time.

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