Of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

Throughout most of United States history, our nation has been involved in wars against those who threaten our freedom, and against our own brethren. The American Civil War was an American tragedy that affected hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, including author Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s experiences in the American Civil War inspired many short stories that show the realistic shock and terror that war can have on a man’s psyche. Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a piece of fiction that accurately represents the realism and the horrible truth of war that Bierce wished to present to his audience. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is typical of Bierce’s style of subject matter, but brings to the
Bierce typically wrote about war fiction that reflected his own experiences on the frontlines, and based on other well-known stories he has written, he believes that in order to accurately tell his stories, he needs to follow realism as closely as possible. This element of war realism can be shown in another one of his stories, “Killed at Resaca.” Like the former story, the latter details the death of the protagonist of the story in a gruesome and grotesque manner. The element of death and destruction between each character is so prevalent that it embodies itself into the theme of realism that Bierce conveys. The scenes in both stories can be shown as very dramatic, but they are not at all theatrical nor do they show unreal characteristics (Bierce, Killed at Resaca). Bierce’s use of direct realism in his stories shows the dread and panic of what war can do to a person. He tries to show how pseudo-glamorous war really can be, and how while the audience may perceive the story as something of art, Bierce wants the reader to know that this type of death and destruction actually happened. This element of grotesque realism is also prevalent in another story by Bierce titled “Chickamauga”. The protagonist of “Chickamauga” is introduced as being as being a young, naïve boy who lives in a small home (assumingly at the location of the Battle of Chickamauga). Bierce goes through
One of the most intriguing ideas that Bierce brings to the table is the use of pseudo-fantasy throughout the story, even though it is still regarded as a story based on realism. Bierce is able to provide two aspects to his story telling that can make the reader confused on what is real and what is not: what the main character, Peyton Farquhar is interpreting as real, and what Farquhar is actually experiencing. Bierce constantly shifts in between these two ideas, and “‘[s]omehow the reader is made to participate in the split between imagination and reason, to feel that the escape is real while he knows it is not’ (157; Woodruff's emphasis)”(Stoicheff). The continued use of fantasy cause a split in interpretation with the reader. The reader believes that Farquhar has, somehow, escaped from the grasp of his captors. Bierce continues on the anecdote of Farquhar escaping for so long that the reader interprets it as reality; this is not the case, as the reader finds out at the end of the story that the false reality Bierce painted was just that- false. Bierce used the third section of the story as a sort of “dream” state that Farquhar was in. Bierce was then able to model the dream as something of a reality, using the constantly changing external stimuli to weave into the details of the story