Compare And Contrast An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

At the time of the Civil War, about 620,000 people were killed. The general public had never seen such a mass of men and boys lost through war, and such a massive loss of life shocked them to the bone. During and after the war, people began to write about their experiences and tell their tale. Many discouraged war because of all the death and destruction it caused, and almost all came out of the war a changed man. During the course of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, a soldier wounded by battle discharges himself from a hospital to find his long lost love again. Similar to Cold Mountain, the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce tells about a soldier, but in captivity. The soldier is prepared to be hanged, but

This further emphasizes the brutal reality and evil the war has brought about. This scene comes about as a Union soldier traps a Confederate scout and personally convicted Fahrquhar and sentenced him to hanging. the narrator’s capturer is viewed as inherently evil. The capturer, Peyton Fahrquhar, teases the man and talks to him before finally hanging him. The main character has an illusion of where he escapes, and eventually Peyton Fahrquhar is the one hanged under Owl Creek Bridge at the end of the story. The irony in the story is very well portrayed, for in the narrator’s illusion he sees his capturer hanged under the bridge instead of him. The irony of this situation intertwines with the symbolism of the bridge itself. The bridge represents death in this story, because of the fact the narrator is hanged there. He knows his death is inevitable, and welcomes it when he realizes he cannot escape, even in his illusion. Not only is the bridge symbolic for death, but it also is beneficial for the reader to picture the scene in which the story takes place. Bierce provides a vivid description of the bridge, with the deep blue river rushing beneath it, so that the reader may picture the narrator’s predicament and what he sees from his point of view. In his illusion, the narrator sees and explains his capturer being the one hanged, saying, “Peyton Fahrquhar was dead;

On Inman’s journey home, he encounters a mother bear and a bear cub. He has had past experience with bears and knew how to handle them, but when the mother bear charged at him, he had no choice but to move away from the cliff behind him. The mother ran off the cliff and only the cub was left. Inman thought about keeping the cub as a pet and giving it to Ada, which was what he would have done before the war. Instead he kills the cub with his pistol, thinking, “What Inman did, though, was all he could do. He picked up the LeMatt’s and shot the cub in the head and watched it pause as its grip on the tree failed and it fell to the ground”(Frazier 354). The cub is very symbolic of Inman’s change through wartime. After the war and his training, he feels that he has to kill the cub to survive, or to put it out of its misery. He did have the choice of hunting other game to eat, but he still cooked the cub. He mentions that before the war he mentions that he would have kept the cub as a pet, possibly given it to Ada, or let it live in the wild. Inman kills the cub because the war has implemented a ‘kill or be killed’ instinct inside