Ambrose Brierce's An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

“You may delay, but time will not” –Benjamin Franklin. Time is everyone’s most valuable asset and their inevitable enemy. It’s something we all wish we could have more of, but unfortunately, can not have. In Ambrose Brierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, time plays as a powerful element in several discrete ways. Time in a larger sense, plays a huge role by setting the story in the historic time of the civil war. Brierce relies on this setting for majority of the content of the story. Time continues to play an important role by turning a story we thought was a work of realism into a very plot twisting, last minute work of surrealism. Brierce is able to manipulate the reader’s mind and perspectives by confusing the reader with the different works of realism and surrealism.

In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Brierce leaves the reader questioning the true nature of time and the effect it has on reality by unconsciously taking us into a long, descriptive altered reality in Peyton’s mind before his death that we later find out never occurred in actual reality.