An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
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| "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Author | Ambrose Bierce | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Country | United States | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Language | English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Genre(s) | Short story | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Published in | Tales of Soldiers and Civilians | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Publication date | 1890 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Author Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "... I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is '[An] Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce. It isn't remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like 'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove."[3]
Plot summary
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. Six military men and a company of infantrymen are present, guarding the bridge and carrying out the sentence. Farquhar thinks of his wife and children and is then distracted by a noise that, to him, sounds like an unbearably loud clanging; it is actually the ticking of his watch. He considers the possibility of jumping off the bridge and swimming to safety if he can free his tied hands, but the soldiers drop him from the bridge before he can act on the idea.In a flashback, Farquhar and his wife are relaxing at home one evening when a soldier rides up to the gate. Farquhar, a supporter of the Confederacy, learns from him 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. He then leaves, but doubles back after nightfall to return north the way he came. The soldier is actually a disguised Union scout who has lured Farquhar into a trap, as any civilian caught interfering with the railroads will be hanged.
The story returns to the present, and the rope around Farquhar's neck breaks when he falls from the bridge into the creek. He frees his hands, pulls the noose away, and surfaces to begin his escape. His senses now greatly sharpened, he dives and swims downstream to avoid rifle and cannon fire. Once he is out of range, he leaves the creek to begin the journey to his home, 30 miles away. Farquhar walks all day long through a seemingly endless forest, and that night he begins to hallucinate, seeing strange constellations and hearing whispered voices in an unknown language. He travels on, urged by the thought of his wife and children despite the pains caused by his ordeal. The next morning, after having apparently fallen asleep while walking, he finds himself at the gate to his plantation. He rushes to embrace his wife, but before he can do so, he feels a heavy blow upon the back of his neck; there is a loud noise and a flash of white, and "then all is darkness and silence".
It is revealed that Farquhar never escaped at all; he imagined the entire third part of the story during the time between falling through the bridge and the noose breaking his neck.
Themes
This short story demonstrates that there is no romance or glory in war. The title of the story contains the word "occurrence", which demonstrates how common the loss of life is within war, lessening the perceived value of those human lives. The fantasy that Farquhar has demonstrated the danger of having illusions about war, because war is not a love story that ends with running to your wife's arms, it has ruthless and pitiless punishment.Another theme present in the story is that of "dying with dignity". The story shows the reader that there is no mitigation for the deaths that occur in warfare, so even attempts to have men die with dignity were lacking in honor.
The final idea focused upon within the piece is the idea of psychological escape right before death. Farquhar experiences an intense delusion to distract him from his inevitable death. The moment of horror that the readers experience at the end of the piece, when they realize that he dies, reflects the distortion of reality that Farquhar encounters.[4]
Since it is not (only) the narrator who tells a story but (also) the reader him- or herself, another aspect is of considerable importance here. As he himself once put it, (bitter) Bierce detested "... bad readers—readers who, lacking the habit of analysis, lack also the faculty of discrimination, and take whatever is put before them, with the broad, blind catholicity of a slop-fed conscience of a parlor pig".[5] Farquhar was duped by a Federal scout—and cursory readers on their part are successfully duped by the author who makes them think they are witnessing Farquhar's lucky escape from the gallows. Instead, they only witness the hallucination of such an escape taking place in the character's unconscious mind which is governed by the instinct of self-preservation. In retrospect we see that the title—if taken literally—from the outset provides the readers with the information that there will not be any change of scenery at all because simply an occurrence at that bridge is announced.
The entire story might well be read as a parable: We are all doomed, and whatever frantic attempts we make to gain our personal salvation—in our final moment there will be no epiphany but only its absolute opposite and negation, just "darkness and silence". This is Bierce's rejection of the Christian thesis of man's final redemption, and it is the ultimate symbol of the futility of human aspiration. Farquhar's miserable end illustrates a most extreme discrepancy between aspiration and reality.
Stories with similar structure
The plot device of a long period of subjective time passing in an instant, such as the imagined experiences of Farquhar while falling, has been explored by several authors.[6] An early literary antecedent appears in the Tang dynasty tale, The Governor of Nanke, by Li Gongzuo. Another medieval antecedent is Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, Chapter XII (c 1335), "Of that which happened to a Dean of Santiago, with Don Illan, the Magician, who lived at Toledo", in which a life happens in an instant.[7][8] Charles Dickens' essay "A Visit to Newgate" wherein a man dreams he has escaped his death sentence has been speculated as a possible source for the story.[9]Bierce's story highlighted the idea of subjective time passing at the moment of death and popularized the fictional device of false narrative continuation, which has been in wide circulation ever since then. Notable examples of this technique from the early-to-mid 20th century include H.G. Wells's "The Door in the Wall" (1906) and "The Beautiful Suit" (1909), Vladimir Nabokov's "Details of a Sunset" (1924) and "The Aurelian" (1930), Jorge Luis Borges's "The Secret Miracle" (1944) and "The South" (1949), William Golding's "Pincher Martin" (1956), as well as Cortazar's "The Island at Midday," and Perutz's "From Nine to Nine".
Among more recent works, David Lynch's later films have been sometimes compared to "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", although they also have been interpreted as the Möbius strip storylines.[10][11] A particularly strong inspiration for the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder, for both Bruce Joel Rubin and Adrian Lyne, was Robert Enrico's 1962 short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,[12] one of Lyne's favourite movies.[13] Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" (1995) reveals the protagonist's past through relating what he remembers—and does not—in the millisecond after he is fatally shot.
And Quiet Flows The Don by Mikhail Sholokhov do look them up they are four volumes.
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