--Wald der Ausgeruht
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short story with a very interesting twist by Ambrose Bierce. The first thing one notices when reading this story is the gratuitous amount of detail devoted to describing everything from the scenery to the physical states of the characters to the actions that the characters perform. It is divided into three parts. The first part, simply a snapshot of a situation, describes a setting where a man is about to be hanged. The second part gives the back story of Peyton Farquhar and why he is being hanged. The third part is where most of the action in the story takes place and consists of Farquhar's apparent escape and journey to meet his family before it is revealed that everything just took place in his imagination. The actual events that make up the third section of the story really only take up an instant as Farquhar falls to his death. The ending where this fact is revealed hit the reader as hard as the rope hits the protagonist's neck in a cruelly ironic twist that is can even be very darkly humorous. Just as Farquhar truly learns to love and appreciate every single aspect of life, he dies. On a personal note, this is one of my favorite short stories of all time.
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I like this one, too. In fact, Bierce is one of my favorite writers. Read Chickamauga; it will get to you about as hard as this one we just read. I think that it is easy to see that he was a journalist at one time. His writing clearly has that style. We have several amazing writers to look at. James is one of them. I look forward to seeing what this discussion will be like.
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