Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

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The Dreamlike Death of Peyton Farquhar


The title of the short story I chose to analyze is Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. The story is set in the South during the Civil War. The main character in the story is a man by the name of Peyton Farquhar. He differs from most main characters in stories in that we originally know little about him. In this paper, I intend to discuss the change that happens in the life of Peyton Farquhar from the beginning of the story to the end. That change is one that is hard to discover because of the fact that we know little about him. However, its easy to see that he does go through changes regarding the way he perceives life, love and the world in general.
The character is developed, strangely, in the middle of the story. The beginning of the story sets the scene of a man preparing to be hanged for war crimes off of a bridge (928, 1). At first, we get the scene explained to us in great detail but know little about the man being hanged himself. We see soldiers in uniform standing on the bridge. We see the river running underneath the bridge. We are given the details about the preparation for the hanging including the exact way that it is to be done (929, 4). It isn’t until the end of the first section of the story that we begin to understand what is going on in Farquhar’s head. We learn that he is looking around at his surroundings, almost admiring them, until he fixes his last thoughts upon his wife and children (930, 1 & 2). We see that the man standing on the one board keeping Farquhar from his death, ends up stepping aside at the end of the first section (930, 4). Then, the story quickly turns to setting up exactly how he got into the predicament in the first place.
We learn, in the second section of the story, that Farquhar is a wealthy planter. He is a slave owner and an original secessionist. One day, a Confederate soldier approached Farquhar at his h...