An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Short Story

The short stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga” by Ambrose Bierce are two completely different stories but similar at the same time, they have the same stylistic techniques and they impact the reader in a similar manner. The first story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, takes place during the American civil war where a wealthy slave owner is being hung for his sympathy towards the confederate soldiers. In the second story “Chickamauga”, a young boy wanders into the woods with a toy sword to “fight” his enemies. These two stories have several similarities, they both take place during the civil war, the stories emphasize the connection between reality and fantasy, they’re also violent and tragic stories. In both of

Sometimes imagery makes a story more eerie, exciting or intense. In “Chickamauga” Bierce made his first story more shocking with this quote, “There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman--the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole, the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles--the work of a shell ” ( Bierce, “Chickamauga”). The boy in the story just found his mother’s dead body.This example of imagery made this very dramatic and shocking because the reader can envision what is happening in their head. Imagery like this makes the reader want to know more about what just happened and due to this they get absorbed by the story. Other examples of imagery aren’t as shocking, they can just make the scene more thrilling. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Bierce uses examples such as, “The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears ” (Bierce, “Occurrence”). This type of imagery is used to make the reader anxious about the character and what’s going to happen to him. The reader feels like they are in the story with the