inevitable death

An occurrence at the owl creek bridge

by Ambrose Bierce

An occurrence in the owl creek bridge by Ambrose Bierce is a story about Peyton Farquhar a men that is about to be hanged because of treason. But the rope brakes and he is able to free his hands and all the ropes while being under water. He is able to avoid all the bullets from the federal soldiers and finally reaches to his family, but as soon as he was going to hug her wife he feels a pain in his neck and we find out that Peyton is dead hanging on the owl creek bridge, and that all the story was simply his last wishes and his imagination,
nothing ever occurred.

On the story Peyton Farquhar is the protagonist and we are able to see many times how far his imagination goes:

"If I could free my hands," he thought, "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.”

This reveals that Peyton is a determined man, and that his last wishes of life were not only to free himself and to save his life but to go home and be with the thing he loves most : his family.It also reveals that Peyton is willing to do everything in order to reach to his family.

I love how Ambrose uses imagery for us to be able to understand better what Peyton is experiencing:

A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of Aeolian harps.


Ambrose is appealing not only to the senses of sight by using words such as "roseate and shone" to describe and to create this image on our mind, but also to the scenes of sound bu telling us how the branches made the sound of aeolian harps helping us to imagine what was Peyton experiencing,

I think that this is an awesome story; the way it mixes reality with imagination is so unexpected and makes the story so interesting. And it is so beautiful how it shows us the last wishes of a man that is abut to die and how far imagination can go.