An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Criticism)

Criticism

Rena Korb

Rena Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she sees “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge “as an early example of the portrayal of a character’s inner psychology in fiction.

Ambrose Bierce may very well have been a man out of time. He was a cynical journalist writing at a time when social thought was dominated by optimism. He was the writer who introduced psychological studies in fiction into an American literary scene dominated by realism, naturalism, and regionalism. He was uncompromising in his refusal to bend to the requests of his publishers. Some people have seen his flight to Mexico in 1913 as his deliberate escape from living in that wrong time period. After finishing the preparation of his twelve-volume Collected Works, Bierce gave up writing to join with Pancho Villa’s revolution as an “observer.” He never returned from this last adventure. His disappearance in Mexico has rendered his death as one of the most celebrated among literary people of letters, captivating the imaginations of people throughout the world.

The legend of “Bitter Bierce” grew after his disappearance (his fate was even envisioned in

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ award-winning novel The Old Gringo), leading some to focus more on his adventurous life than on his writings. Many critics do feel that Bierce’s work was overlooked and rejected by his contemporaries. One of the reasons for this may lie in Bierce’s handling of his own work: he turned down offers of popular magazines to publish his stories because he did not want them to undergo editing; his work was published by small presses in California, not the big East Coast firms, to ensure that Bierce had complete authorial control. While these practices may have preserved his writing in their pristine form, they certainly did nothing to gain Bierce national attention. Despite these obstacles, Bierce did have significant claims to the literary world during his lifetime. Mark Twain numbered among the members of Bierce’s California circle of writers, and William Dean Ho wells referred to him as one of the leading men of letters in America. In the Midst of Life, the volume which includes “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” drew favorable commentary on both sides of the Atlantic upon its publication. Some reviewers even ranked Bierce with such masters of the short story as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In the words of critic Cathy Davidson, Bierce has staked his claim as “the precursor of postmodern fiction.” In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” his best-known story, Bierce displays many of the literary techniques that show the modernity that was ahead of its time. He was one of the first American writers to hold up the act of war and show it, not humorously or as picturesque, but for what it was: murder. He shortened the short story and made its elements sharper by using compressed methods of description. Most importantly, perhaps, and what would be most influential for twentieth-century writers, he “invented” many literary techniques: the close examination of time; an attention to mental fictions in order to avoid real life; the blending of fantasy and reality. Stories by the Latin American postmodern writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar are clearly indebted to Bierce, both in narration and style. Though fanciful, there is a grain of truth in the reasoning behind one critic’s hypothesis that Bierce did not the in 1914, but that he waited in the Andes until the rest of the world caught up with him and then reemerged in South America to write under the name “Jorge Luis Borges”!

In an essay from 1941, H.E. Bates writes, “Bierce is the connecting link between Poe and the American short story of to-day.” Bierce carries on this tradition dramatically and skillfully in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a Southern gentlemen, Peyton Farquhar, is about to be hanged for sabotaging a Union railroad bridge during the Civil War. Like many of Poe’s stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been seen as a work of terror replete with moments of black humor. Other critics have found its early exploration of Farquhar’s psychology as a forerunner to the theories of Sigmund Freud. The story has even spawned the fiction of “post-mortem consciousness,” in which, at the moment of death, the hero futilely struggles to impose his or her will on the universe, creating another temporary reality and escaping death; Ernest Hemingway, William Golding, Borges, and Cortazar have all written in this genre. More simple yet as important is Stephen Crane’s analysis of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”: “Nothing better exists — the story has everything.”

As Bierce may have been a man out of time, so might “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” have been a story out of time. It is modern in its psychological motif of how a man’s consciousness attempts to deal with the fact that he is about to die. Its execution is modern; fifty years after the story was written, and decades before writers like Borges and Cortazar rediscovered Bierce’s techniques, H.E. Bates noted that the story was written in a “language much nearer to the prose of our own day than that of Bierce’s day.” Bierce strives to set the reader firmly and immediately in the story from the opening paragraph: “The man’s hands were behind his back, his wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck.” Clearly, there is no need for preliminaries. Bierce also shows Farquhar’s distortion of time in an effort to fend off death. Farquhar looks down at the “stream racing madly beneath his feet” yet notes only how slowly a piece of driftwood caught in the current seems to move. He becomes aware of a recurring noise that inexplicably slows down so that the “intervals of silence grew progressively longer, the delays became maddening.” It is only the ticking of his watch, sounding out “the tolling of a death knell.” By the end of the story, Farquhar himself has turned into a timepiece, but one that keeps regular time, as he swings like a pendulum “gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.”

Perhaps the most engaging and provocative technique used in the story is the blending of fantasy and reality, the mixing of the external world of death with Farquhar’s internal world, which cries out for life. While some people refer to this lack of distinction as leading to a “trick” ending, most critics (and readers) agree that Farquhar’s death is apparent to anyone who pays attention to the clues. The first appears while Farquhar still stands on the railroad bridge. His dream of escape — “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home” — is his last conscious thought. Then, he plunges to his death and his mind proceeds to act out this very fantasy, down to the same details of escape. The similarity here is too striking to overlook. That his escape is fantasy is also apparent numerous times throughout its enactment. Farquhar’s senses are impossibly keen; he hears ripples in the water as “separate sounds,” he is able to see the “individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf. . .the very insects upon them.” If this has not proven the true bent of the story, Bierce next shows Farquhar as inhabiting an unreal environment, one that is unnaturally eerie and devoid of people. He travels on a road “as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled.” He can feel that his neck is in pain, his eyes are congested, and his tongue is swollen, yet “he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet.” At this, the end of his life, he finally recognizes that the world is not that secure place where “no adventure was too perilous” but a changing universe in which the very stars have a “secret and malign significance.”

This blending of fantasy and reality is also used to show how each of the story’s three sections demonstrates a different one of Farquhar’s incorrect beliefs. In the first section, Farquhar denies what is about to happen. The use of military terminology and a factual tone convey the clinical and inescapable nature of the hanging — the sergeant “would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between the ties” — yet the “civilian” still delves into fantasy, dreaming of freeing his hands and escaping. The second part of the story, a flashback, shows Farquhar’s inability to distinguish military reality with his vision of the glorious, “larger life of the soldier.” He clearly has no experience with military tactics and allows himself to be tricked by a Federal spy into burning the railroad bridge. Though he fatally believes that he has the “heart of soldier,” when he does not even have the good sense of a soldier, he still embraces this chance at sabotage as his “opportunity for distinction.” What Farquhar ultimately finds in war is obscurity; his yearning for a soldier’s adventure has led him simply to be “the man who was engaged in being hanged.”

If the second and third sections show Farquhar’s predisposition for creating fantasy, this third and last part of the story is a sort of “living and breathing” fantasy: that of Farquhar’s “escape.” The Farquhar seen here is an improved man. He is certainly more knowledgeable than the Farquhar who let himself be tricked by the Yankees; witness his analysis of what kind of shots the troop will fire on him. The language in this last section is luxurious, with the sand of the riverbank “like diamonds, rubies, emeralds” and the forest through which Farquhar travels full of “whispers in an unknown tongue.” The descriptions are imaginative as is the journey that Farquhar makes to his home. And even in the moment of death, fantasy does not give way to reality. The noose tightens around his neck, but Farquhar believes he is about to embrace his wife. As the rope tightens, breaking his neck, “he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon — then all is darkness and silence !” Once Farquhar has entered into his fantasy, nothing can vanquish it except death.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Stephen Crane’s 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage realistically depicts the psychological complexities of fear and courage on the battlefield.
• In his essay “The Moon Letters” (1903), Bierce discusses his theories on the responsibilities of readers and writers.
• Edgar Allan Poe’ s 1842 short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” is told in the first person by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who relates his experiences with imprisonment and torture.
• The Old Gringo, a novel by Carlos Fuentes, is an imaginary account of what happened to Bierce after he disappeared in Mexico in 1913.
• In his 1865 poetry collection Drum-Taps, which contains such famous poems as “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” American poet Walt Whitman relates his experiences in the Civil War.
• P.M.H. Atwater’s 1995 book Beyond the Light examines the physical and psychological effects of near-death experiences.