How Does Bierce Use Literary Devices In An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge Individualism

Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. War tends to change family life and past relationships for the worst, especially the Civil War, where it started a new precedent for war. Ambrose Bierce, author of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, served in the confederate army during the Civil war, but was eventually discharged due to him suffering a severe head wound. Though, during his time in war, Bierce was able to experience the truth behind it, and on what the government tries to hide from the public. He took this experience and he started to write and was able to sabotage the idea of war in his passages. In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Bierce used a variety of literacy devices to disguise his interpretation of war by using the color gray and individualism to demonstrate how it is a damaging event in this world.

In the second section of the story, the main character, Peyton Fahrquhar, and his wife encounter a gray-clad solider, who is supposed to represent a Confederate soldier. In this sense, the color grey symbolizes a distortion of truth because the gray-clad solider is actually a Northerner disguised in his enemy’s colors, and eventually tricks Fahrquhar into a death trap at the lake. Later in the story, when Fahrquhar is being hunted down in the third section, Bierce uses symbolism and imagery again in the passage, “He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.”(). Fahrquhar has gray eyes, just like the sentinel who is about to shoot him, but misses. This is coincidence is supposed to symbolize how the North and South have split families on both sides and the distinction between the two sides have collapsed at that moment because of