An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce BACKGROUND Ambrose (author) was a guy who used to be in the army during the Civil War. After he was in the army, he was a newspaper writer. This story takes place during the Civil war. MAIN CHARACTERS Peyton Farquhar: He is the main dude of the story. He is a southern guy who gets hanged during the Civil war. PLOT The story starts out with some Northern soldiers (Yankees) at Owl Creek Bridge. They have Peyton standing on a platform, kinda hanging off the railroad bridge. He has a noose around his neck. They are preparing to kick the platform so Peyton hangs and dies. Then right before he is about to die, Peyton starts to think about his wife and kids. Then he thinks about why he is there. He has a flashback to some night where a southern soldier came to their door. The soldier stopped at their house to get water. He also told Peyton about the northern troops trying to rebuild the railroad for another attack. Then Peyton started asking him what would happen if he went and sabotaged the railroad. The soldier tells him that he would be hanged by the northern army. After the soldier leaves, we find out he rides back up north because he is a northern spy. He was just pretending to be a southern soldier, just to trick Peyton. Then the story cuts back to Peyton about to die. The northern troops kick out the platform and Peyton is about to die. But then he breaks the rope from the bridge and falls into the water below. He starts to swim away and escape. The troops shoot at him but they miss. Peyton swims and swims. Then he dives underwater and swims some more. All the while Peyton is talking to himself and telling himself what he should do to avoid getting shot. Then Peyton finally reaches land. He goes up on shore and walks to his family’s house. He goes home and sees his beautiful wife and his kids. But the last lines of the book are a big plot twist. It turns out this whole escape thing never happens. This was all his imagination while he was hanging from the noose. He just imagines this escape with his last moments of life. Peyton dies at the end, by hanging off the Owl Creek Bridge.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is divided into three sections. In section I, Peyton Farquhar is standing on a railroad bridge, twenty feet above the water. His wrists are bound behind his back, and around his neck is a noose that is tied to a beam overhead. He is positioned on loose planks that have been laid over the crossties of the train tracks to create a makeshift platform. Two soldiers from the Northern army, a sergeant, and a captain immediately surround him, awaiting the execution. Beyond them, armed
sentinels stand at attention. The bridge is bordered on one side by forest and, across the stream, open ground that gives way to a small hillock on which a small fort has been erected. A motionless company of infantrymen, led by their lieutenant, stands assembled before the fort. As the two soldiers finalize the preparations, they step back and remove the individual planks on which they had been standing. The sergeant salutes the captain then positions himself on the opposite end of the board supporting Farquhar, as the captain, like the soldiers, steps off and away from the crossties.
Awaiting the captain’s signal, the sergeant is about to likewise step away, sending Farquhar to dangle from the bridge’s edge. Farquhar stares into the swirling water below. He watches a piece of driftwood being carried downstream and notes how sluggish the stream seems to be. He shuts his eyes to push away the distractions of his present situation and focus more intently on thoughts of his wife and children. He suddenly hears a sharp, metallic ringing, which sounds both distant and close by. The sound turns out to be the ticking of his watch. Opening his eyes and peering again into the water, Farquhar imagines freeing his hands, removing the noose, and plunging into the stream, swimming to freedom and his home, safely located outside enemy lines. These thoughts have barely registered in Farquhar’s mind when the captain nods to the sergeant and the sergeant steps away from the board.
In section II, we learn that Farquhar was a successful planter, ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Unable to join the Confederate army, he yearned to help the South’s war effort in some significant way. One evening in the past, Farquhar and his wife were sitting on the edge of their property when a gray-clad soldier rode up, seeking a drink of water. The soldier appeared to be from the Confederate army. While his wife was fetching the water, Farquhar asked for news of the front and was informed that Northern forces had repaired the railroads in anticipation of launching another advance, having already reached the Owl Creek bridge. Any civilian caught interfering with the North’s efforts in the area, the soldier went on to reveal, would be hanged. Farquhar asked how a civilian could attempt some form of sabotage. The soldier told him that one could
easily set fire to the driftwood that had piled up near the bridge after the past winter’s flood. The man, who was actually a Northern scout in disguise, finished his drink and rode off, only to pass by an hour later heading in the opposite direction.
Section III brings us back to the present, at the hanging. Farquhar loses consciousness as he plummets down from the side of the bridge. He is awakened by currents of pain running through his body. A loud splash wakes him up even more abruptly, and he realizes that the noose has broken—sending him falling into the stream below. Farquhar sees a light flicker and fade before it strengthens and brightens as he rises, with some trepidation, to the surface. He is afraid he will be shot by Northern soldiers as soon as he is spotted in the water. Freeing his bound hands, then lifting the noose from his neck, he fights extreme pain to break through the surface and take a large gasp of air, which he exhales with a shriek. Farquhar looks back to see his executioners standing on the bridge, in silhouette against the sky. One of the sentinels fires his rifle at him twice. Farquhar can see the gray eye of the marksman through the gun’s sights.
Farquhar then hears the lieutenant instructing his men to fire, so he dives down to avoid the shots. He quickly removes a piece of metal that sticks in his neck. Farquhar comes back up for air as the soldiers reload, and the sentinels fire again from the bridge. Swimming with the current, Farquhar realizes that a barrage of gunfire is about to come his way. A cannonball lands two yards away, sending a sheet of spray crashing over him. The deflected shot goes smashing into the trees beyond. Farquhar believes they will next fire a spray of grapeshot from the cannon, instead of a single ball, and he will have to anticipate the firing. Suddenly he is spun into a disorienting whirl, then ejected from the river onto a gravelly bank out of sight and range of his would-be executioners and their gunfire.
He weeps with joy and marvels at the landscape, having no desire to put any more distance between him and his pursuers, when a volley of grapeshot overhead rouses him. He heads into the forest, setting his path by the sun and traveling the entire day. The thought of his family urges him on. Taking a remote road, he finds himself in the
early morning standing at the gate of his home. As he walks toward the house, his wife steps down from the verandah to meet him. He moves to embrace her but feels a sharp blow on the back of his neck and sees a blinding white light all about him. Then silence and darkness engulf him. Farquhar is dead, his broken body actually swinging from the side of the Owl Creek bridge. Short Summary Notes: Ambrose Bierce’s short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge takes place during the Civil War. Union soldiers are preparing to hang Peyton Farquhar, a civilian who tries to plan his escape with a noose around his neck. There is a stream below, and though there are other soldiers standing guard, he things he can make it home. A sergeant stands opposite him on the same loose board and he knows that as soon as the other man steps off of the board, he will fall and die. With his hands tied, it’s difficult to make his escape happen. Just as he is thinking of getting outside of the territory held by the Union Army, the sergeant steps off of the board. Bierce then flashes back in order to show readers how Peyton came to be on the bridge over Owl Creek, with his life about to end. Peyton had been a plantation owner who was unable to serve in the Confederate Army, though he wanted to. When a soldier stops by his plantation, he asks the man how the war is going. The soldier describes how the Union Army is taking more and more territory, and how it is constructing a railroad over Owl Creek. He tells Peyton it could be stopped if someone managed to burn the bridge at Owl Creek. However, he also tells Peyton that the commander of the Union Army plans to arrest and hang any civilian who tries to interfere with the construction of the railroad. The soldier passes by again, this time heading north to return to his army—the Union Army—after his scouting mission. Peyton’s thoughts return to his present tribulations as he falls from the bridge, the rope around his neck choking him. He is brought from his thoughts of how he got there by the blinding pain of being choked. When the rope around his neck breaks, Peyton plummets into the water below and manages to free his hands, and then his neck. The soldiers begin to shoot at him in the water, missing his face by mere inches. Despite being shot at multiple times with bullets and even a canon ball, Peyton manages to get out of the water and into the woods. From there, he finds a road that will take him closer to home. The road is wide but strangely empty. Despite his pain from being choked, he continues walking home. His throat is swollen, as are his eyes and tongue. When he
sees his home, he can see his wife waiting to greet him. Just before he is about to hold her, he sees a blinding light and then nothing. His neck is broken and Peyton Farquhar swings, dead, from Owl Creek Bridge. Everything that happens, from when the sergeant steps off the board until the end of the story, happens only in his imagination. The rope didn’t brake. The soldiers didn’t fire at him. He didn’t escape to make his way home. The commander kept his word and hanged the civilian who tried to disrupt the Union Army’s progress with the railroad. The ability to tell what’s real from what isn’t is a major theme present in this short story. From the beginning, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is about deception. The soldier who tells Peyton about the railroad is deceiving him. While he is honest about the Union Army’s efforts to build the railroad and the consequences of disrupting that work, he deceives Peyton about who he is. He is a Union soldier pretending to be a Confederate, and in so doing, removes one more plantation owner from the south. Similarly, Bierce’s reader is susceptible to deception. The details of Peyton’s escape are vivid enough to convince the reader that perhaps he truly found freedom. However, the end of the story proves that Peyton is, in fact, dead. Stylistically, Bierce’s treatment of time in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is worth noting. Bierce is able to use language to speed time up or slow it down, depending on the needs of the story. For example, the scenes of the execution seem to happen quickly, while Peyton’s escape seems to take longer, even though it happens in the split second that it takes for Peyton to fall and for his neck to break. A third, and equally important, theme is the idea that people will do anything to convince themselves that they can cheat death. Before his own, Peyton imagines a stroke of luck that lands him in the water below the bridge. The fall does not injure him. He doesn’t drown. The soldiers don’t manage to hit him, and he finds a road to travel that is void of any soldiers despite the armies being active in the area thanks to the war—not to mention there is no one else around. As unrealistic as this turn of events seems, Peyton believes it to be true because he does not want to die.