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An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Literary Analysis

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The One Thing Man Cannot Escape In 1976, the Blue Öyster Cult told the World not to fear the reaper. Even though it happens to every living organism, humans have a contradictory fear of dying. This aversion to death is a prominent theme among all types of literature. In the book Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut and short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, the main characters fear death so much that they create an alternate reality to avoid it. Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five also tries to avoid his ultimate demise by living in the nostalgia of his past and staying away from the future. In the play Endgame by Samuel Beckett, the main characters try to stay alive by remaining stagnate in their desolate world. …show more content…

He tries to live forever by creating an alien race called the Tralfamadorians. These aliens, “escape the potential despair by a theory of the universality of time which allows them to slip away from present difficulties into past or future happiness” (O'Sullivan). Pilgrim quickly accepts this idea and it allows for him to travel through time and to a happier memory when something bad happens to him. Even at certain times he is taken to the planet Tralfamadore where he is, “trapped in the amber of [that] moment” (Vonnegut 77). Pilgrim’s travels to this planet are what open his mind to time travel and how to escape dismal times. 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). It turns out that the “occurrence” is just the main character being hanged, not the outlandish adventure that Farquhar

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a story created by literary genius Ambrose Bierce and is set during Civil War times… The short story tells the narrative of Peyton Farquhar, a sympathizer of confederates who has been sentenced to his end by lynching from the Owl Creek Bridge…An occurrence at owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce shows why having an imagination is critical in making it through impossible times… An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a richly formulated observation on the flowing nature of time and need for imagination when a person going through tricky situation in his life… In the short story, the main character, Farquhar, generates his dream world out of desperation… Farquhar is on the verge of death, and imagining that escape

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The passages following the hanging of Mr. Farquhar showcase a separate style from the exposition. As his mind shuts down from asphyxiation, his experiences become wrought with imagery and alliteration, such as “dancing driftwood” (Bierce 2). In addition to leaving the linearity of the normal timestream, Mr. Farquhar has begun a journey into the surreal as he loses consciousness. The flashback recounts

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In conclusion, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” demonstrates several foreshadowing techniques to predict Farquhar’s fate, such as imagery and preternatural plot elements. The preternatural ability to hear a watch ticking at a vociferous volume reveals that Farquhar was simply imagining that his time is ticking away. Also, the use of imagery when he is unnaturally describing the distant trees in great detail shows that he is dreaming about that as well and not living in reality, so he has not escaped the fact that he will die in real

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