Owl Creek Bridge Irony

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce has a unique plot twist. It is a suspenseful short story due to the effectiveness of the flashbacks. It takes place during the Civil War. It is about a confederate sympathizer, Peyton Farquhar who is about to be hanged from the Owl Creek Bridge by Union soldiers for his unsuccessful attempt to blow up the bridge. Bierce uses time to manipulate the readers perspective. His manipulation of time, language and perspective in the story is the clue placed by him to show Farquhar’s fallibility.Time is defined by "a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession." It is when the reader can no longer distinguish actual reality from a perceived reality.The disruption …show more content…

Having to face death in such a brutal manner leaves Peyton Farquhar reminiscent of his wife and home. "He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children."
The reader's ability to sympathize with the character through a distortion of time and to begin to question the nature and subjectivity of time make apparent how relative truth is. In "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", reality is subject to time, emotions, and the reader assumptions. Each individual aspect effects reality significantly. The story gives the insight and the emotions of a dying man how he plans and and dreams of an escape to his family. The author has used his language and the flashbacks to make the readers sympathetic towards Peyton.
While watching a film you basically watch a story created of an imagination and reading a story is more like creating your own imagination. Apart from narrating the storyline in depth, books explain the thoughts going through a characters' minds while performing an action, which lets you connect with them better and immerse yourself deeper in the story. In a film many elements like music and background set up is used to depict the thoughts of the character but while reading a story the words and language used creates the imagination and makes the reader feel from his own perspective which is very difficult to convey through a

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