An Occurrence of Desperate Imagination

“Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timber of the Owl Creek Bridge.” This line brings about a finale which the reader may have expected from the beginning, but the path which the plot careens on takes the reader down a folly of reality.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is set in Northern Alabama during 1863, the year that the Union Army pushed into the deep-south-state of Alabama. During the American Civil War, there was a lack of collective consciousness and spirit in North America. The definition of patriotism was exclusively dependant on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you happened to find yourself. Written in 1891, well after the conclusion of the war, author Ambrose Bierce (a retired Union Major) wrote of an experience he himself may have been a part of in his days of soldiery. Bierce takes his knowledge of war atrocities and delves into the mind of the damned. His examination of the power of the mind under duress is taken to a great level of awareness through the damned man’s visions.

Farquhar’s perceived dilation of time and heightened auditory and visual senses create a sort-of supernatural state in which his mind manifests a mental reality of his conscious’ projection of hope. It is in these themes that Bierce allows his main character to live his final moments in a euphoric and uplifting dream-state, where his greatest dream comes to fruition; to be free of the noose about his neck. It is this study of the true nature of human perception that Ambrose Bierce comments on the power of imagination. No one could say it better than the late, great Kurt Vonnegut when he spoke of Bierce’s story as “the greatest American short story, and a work of flawless American genius.”