Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

The overall atmosphere of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce is geared to keep you from assuming the ending, especially during the majority of the third section. With its nonlinear time structure, parts of the story can seem a tad convoluted in how they lead up to the finale. Many things can be said about the unexpected ending, but “typical” is most likely exempt from that list. In the days following this book’s release there have been a large quantity of authors wanting the same feeling from this book in their books.

This book uses large but subtle foreshadowing to keep the reader unassuming about how the ending comes. Firstly, a big clue as to his fate is his own when he falls; that he “was as one already dead” even before he reached the bottom of the rope. Many of the pieces of narration convey something having to do with death, even though the narrator has somehow survived hanging, which already seems fairly suspicious to me. When his neck hit the end of the rope, pain shot through him like a heartbeat going outward through his body, swings back and forth for a little, and then escapes through the luck of a tear in the rope. What happens next really drives home

the feeling of supernaturalism in the story.
As Peyton Farquhar, Confederate supporter almost hanged by Union soldiers, is sinking, his hands develop what seem to be conscious movements as they work to remove the rope strangling him.

As he breaks free and sees the world above the water his sight has been magnified by a hundredfold, as he can now see minute details from a distance while he was still in the river. One could probably think, “Oh, hey, that’s neat. He’s got super vision now,” but this part is somewhat glazed over by his journey back to his wife and children. After a thirty mile walk that last day and night he makes it back to his house, exhausted, delirious, and finally with his family. In the end, the whole scene from him surviving the hanging on was just a farce, as he was hanged by the soldiers the whole

time.
The whole time the dream sequence in Farquhar’s mind may be fake, but shows how an irregular time structure and proper use of foreshadowing can keep a reader from guessing any sort of plot point. These days new stories try to make plot twists that can surprise thousands, and a few can still meet with the same success as this story. It’s mostly that media has been around for so long that almost everything has been done by now, and trying to find that new “thing” is what writers and producers try to find.