Owl Creek Bridge Theme

Ambrose Bierce’s "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", is the story of Peyton Farquhar, who is a confederate farmer who is being hanged for trying to destroy a union army bridge. The story centers on a different reality that Farquhar creates in his mind, while he's really hanging, with no heartbeat, just activity in his brain. Farquhar creates an escape in his mind, seconds before he is actually dead. The story focuses on a few different major themes including, the fluidity of time, versions of reality, and death.

I feel as if the author uses death as the major theme to the story. He explores the human desire to escape death, and not die, just as Farquhar imagined he did seconds before he actually died. In his mind he came up with a complete way to escape his fate and truly believed it, but as we know, he didn’t escape anything and it was all a result of his imagination. The author even heightens the main character to by enhancing his senses that he experiences at the end of his life, a result do to our body’s natural instincts. This gives the reader the deception that he has truly escaped and

The author distorts the readers idea of time, by making everything that happened, in a long and detailed story, though in reality Farquhar’s death only was seconds long. Farquhar is being hanged, his brain is the only thing now functioning and he imagines and entire scene, on how to escape and live, and the author writes as if it is all true. Though we find out it is not, and the entire story was just a dream just seconds before death. At certain points of the story time seems to pass by extremely fast but at other times it goes by slow, like when he imagines that he is in the river and he is noticing ever little detail. The experience Farquhar is having with time is something we all go through, at certain points in our life time seems to go by fast and other times it goes by slow, it is all just a perception of our