Oh the Irony!

The use of irony is widely applied today in films, conversations, and literature. Irony can be helpful in literature when depicting the difference between illusion and reality. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there are examples of how irony is used in stories. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a story of a man named Peyton Farquhar who is involuntarily waiting to be hanged at Owl Creek Bridge. However, before passing away, he envisions himself escaping his death and seeing his family. “Young Goodman Brown” is also about a young man who just married a woman named Faith. Further into the story, it appears that the man went on a journey and learned that not everything is how it seems. The authors of these stories have included the use of irony to distinguish between illusion and reality. In the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce presents an interesting story that lures any reader at the start. The protagonist of the story is about to be hanged to his death but daydreams beforehand and during the scene. Everything that is happening to him physically, or in reality, affects his daydreaming. In other words, when Bierce casts about for a psychologically realistic structure for the intimate experience of the mind undergoing death, he chooses this model of the dream as the most proximate and familiar, consistently weaving external stimuli into the details of Farquhar's dream narrative of escape in almost, but not entirely, unrecognizable form (Stoicheff). Taking what Stoicheff has proposed, the man could feel what was going on around him, and if there were things that did not match with his dream, it would not be so certain that it was, in fact, a dream and not reality.

Works Cited

Stoicheff, Peter. "Something uncanny': the dream structure in Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Studies in Short Fiction 30.3 (1993): 349+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.

Jamil, S. Selina. "Carnivalesque freedom in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown." The Explicator 65.3 (2007): 143+. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.

Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Robert Zweig. 5th Compact ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2012. 6-13. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Robert Zweig. 5th Compact ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2012. 6-13. Print.