In Ambrose Bierce’s classic civil war era short story an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge the author creates two similar worlds that successfully trick the reader into questioning which world is real and which exists only in the protagonist’s imagination. The story, set in the Confederate State of Alabama during the American Civil War, narrates the inner thoughts and feelings of a man named Peyton Farquhar during his execution. Since the story follows the sequence of events as seen by Farquhar, the narrator tells of Farquhar’s escape where the rope miraculously breaks and he falls to the river below completely unharmed even though they only happened in his imagination. The reason this miraculous escape seems too good to be true is because it is and Peyton Farquhar never left Owl Creek Bridge alive. Unknown to us, at the moment of Farquhar’s execution Bierce changes the timeline of the story and transitions into a dream world existing only in Farquhar’s imagination. The two concepts that this paper will interpret are the two timelines created by Bierce and how they are connected to each other and our modern world. Through textual evidence and the analysis of academic sources that discuss the meaning of this short story I will explain the meaning of this story and reveal real world inspiration for it.

The dream world in an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a crucial part of the story and its where the majority of act three is set. At the end of Act One Peyton Farquhar is desperately trying to find a way to get free and escape. Act One ends with Peyton planning his escape ‘” If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home”’ (Bierce 7). This was Farquhar’s final thought before the sergeant that held up the plank under his feet released it and Farquhar hung. When we return to Farquhar is Act Three the text describes the excruciating pain around his throat and the sense of suffocation; however, Peyton’s fall led him to the bottom of the river rather than the end of the rope. The divide between the First Act and Third Act is clearly where the real-world ends and Peyton’s dream world begins. Without knowing the twist ending no one would realize the transition into a new reality because of the near identicalness of the two. The most unusual part of this alternate world is the fact that the transition and entire story of the great escape occurs in a matter of seconds in Farquhar’s when we know that he instantly died. One explanation of this phenomenon comes from a nineteenth century study of dreams which set out to explain how the events of a dream could match up with stimuli felt in the real world. For example, a French writer named Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury described a dream he had where he was being executed during the French Revolution. His head is placed under a guillotine and when the blade is about to cut his head off he wakes up to the sensation of something heavy pressing against his neck. What really happened to Maury was nothing to do with the French Revolution or a guillotine, but his bed simply collapsed and a piece of the headboard landed on his neck and the feeling resembled the feeling of the blade pressing against his neck. The climax of the dream being perfectly in sync with a real world sensation that resembles it is way to uncanny to be just a coincidence. Maury did research “concluding that dreams do indeed have their source in such [objective] phenomena” (Stoicheff 350). What this means is that these dreams don’t have some uncanny ability to predict the external sensation but instead react to it. The theory states that “Most likely, the dreamer recalls the narrative of the dream as moving in a linear fashion toward its climax, whereas the narrative events that seem to precipitate the climax may actually follow it in the dreamer’s unconscious, not culminated by the external phenomenon but generated by it.” (Stoicheff 350) So in the case of Maury’s dream the headboard collapsed first which caused the subconscious mind to create the story of the French Revolution and guillotine to explain what that external phenomenon was. When the dreamer wakes up the dream feels like it was a linear story building up to the climax; however, it was all imagined the moment the external phenomenon occurred and pieced together extremely quickly. Since the dream experienced by Peyton Farquhar also occurred in the millisecond before his death this same theory can be applied.

The whole dream sequence is very unusual because of the unlikeliness of any of it. Since the Third Act isn’t revealed to be the imagination of Peyton Farquhar until the very last sentence of the short story we are lead to believe that the escape is happening despite how absurd the entire thing sounds, after all he was trapped on the bridge “looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. [his] hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck” (Bierce 1). Peyton Farquhar was guarded by a small army of Union soldier and a noose tied around his neck, and even if he managed to free himself of his bonds and fall to the river below he would be greeted by a twenty foot fall, swift rapids, and a hail storm of bullets. However, “Bierce makes us submit to the power of the irrational imagination by turning Farquhar’s innermost thoughts and feelings into a seemingly real tale of daring escape” (Woodruff 155-156). Bierce makes us believe the Third Act is real while the text itself tells us the opposite. The reason we believe the escape tale to be true is because we would like to believe it. Peyton Farquhar is described as good looking with “a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray” (Bierce 3), Farquhar is a good looking man with a well trimmed facial hair and a nice frock coat who was deceived by the enemy and now faces death, “it is the kind of tale we would like to believe because Farquhar himself is such an attractive figure: brave, sensitive, and highly intelligent” (Woodruff 156). This is part of what makes the dream so uncanny, that when reading Act Three we disregard the facts and logic in order to rationalize that the escape actually happens instead of seeing it for what it is, a dream. The dream feels so bizarre because of our attempts to rationalize the events and our desire to believe them to be true. Bierce molds the story so that we can simultaneously believe and not believe the escape is real. Carefully reading the text and thinking logically about the fact reveals that this is nothing more than a dream but the entire time but Bierce tries to convince us that the whole escape takes place in reality. “Somehow the reader is made to participate in the split between imagination and reason, to feel that the escape is real while he knows that it is not” (Woodruff 157). Blended into the dream are real feelings and emotions that people experience, such as the discomfort that Farquhar feels when he can’t breathe underwater, the adrenaline rush he feels while dodging a barrage of bullets, or when he is tired walking through the forest and finally the joy he feels when being reunited with his family. The use of feelings and emotions that all readers can relate to makes us feel more connected to Farquhar and the dream. Also, Bierce eventually describes Farquhar reaching the safety of the forest, “The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of harps” (Bierce 33), the forest sounds like paradise and tricks the reader into believing that Farquhar has reached the promised land and his safety is guaranteed. This is done just so that the surprise ending comes as more of a surprise. The disconnect between what we know to be true and what we choose to believe is the source of the unusual tone and feeling of the dream world, because if we accepted that all these impossible things happen within in the dream and are only Farquhar’s imagination then we can relate to the story because we experience these dreams ourselves and the twist ending would not come as such a shock. 

While Bierce creates a fantasy world with the intention of tricking the reader he also gives out hints about the true nature of things. At the end of Act One Bierce says that “these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it” (Bierce 7). Before he died Farquhar was desperately trying to find some way to escape and he thought that if he were able free his hands he could get the noose off his neck, jump into the river below, swim to the shore dodging the bullets and returning to his family. Bierce says the thoughts were flashed into Farquhar’s mind rather than evolving from it, meaning that instead of evolving, or becoming more than just a plan in his head, they flashed in his mind when the sergeant stepped off the plank holding him up and those thoughts flashing across his mind were the last thing he thought and were the inspiration of the dream. He also repeatedly describes Farquhar as having “sharp pressure upon his throat” (Bierce 18) and having swollen, painful bruises on his neck.

The death of Peyton Farquhar was a tragedy and the loss of life is not something that should ever be done. Every major religion teaches the importance of life and denounces murder. Every countries’ government has laws in place that make any kind of murder illegal except for self-defense. This is important because an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge takes place during the American Civil War and the loss of life, both military and civilian, is unfortunately very common during war and Peyton Farquhar is just another victim of this. The reason that Farquhar went to that bridge and was captured in the first place happened because of the conflict between the Union and Confederacy. A Union spy posing as a Confederate soldier convinced Farquhar to burn down a Union bridge that they used to transport supplies. The mentality of armies during wartime is that anyone supporting the opposing cause is an enemy any should be hated, so the Union army tricked, captured, and then slaughtered Peyton Farquhar in cold blood. Bloodshed like this isn’t unique to Ambrose Bierce’s short story either, unfortunately immoral and disgusting crimes like this occur frequently in war. It’s important to realize that soldier and civilians alike will die in war and to always remember that. Peace should always be the goal when resolving conflicts rather than quickly rushing to violence. This story ending with Peyton Farquhar dying illustrates one very important thing, we can’t pretend that the horrors of war aren’t going on and just pretend everyone walks away unharmed like Peyton did in Act Three. By showing us the reality of war through the twist ending that had Farquhar hanging from the bridge instead of with his family Bierce made a statement that people die in war and it effects their friends and families as well. In the Civil War alone its estimated that 620,000 people died so it’s important to be aware of the consequences of war before declaring it so easily.

Peyton Farquhar’s dream of freedom after being condemned to death is also something that can happen in the real world. While the events that he hallucinated are the dream world of Act Three Farquhar still experiences the hallucination in the real world, meaning that im not evaluating the dream world but the ability to create the dream world in the real world. In 1836 Charles Dickens visited a famous London prison called Newgate. One prisoner that Dickens talked to was a man condemned to die the next day. The man told Dickens that he had “dreams that he is back home and sees his wife as she was in the days of innocence when they were first married. His dream then shifts to the jury and the guilty verdict for his unspecified crime, but he escapes via an open prison gate, runs through the night, and falls asleep” (Tabachnick 1), but when he wakes up in the morning the entire night proved to be nothing but a dream and he was still on death row. This is incredibly similar to the execution of Peyton Farquhar because both men are condemned to die with no realistic hope for escape and experience dreams in which they escape. While the prisoner’s dream took place in his bed at night and Farquhar’s dream was a hallucination moments before his death both are examples of the brain trying to escape death, like a coping mechanism. Both men’s wives also play a central role in the dream because they evoke feelings of happiness or love that help the men feel happy despite the certainty that they will soon die. There is a very key difference between these men though, the prisoner is a real person while Peyton Farquhar is fictional. While it might seem like these two stories aren’t related, Dicken’s account of the Newgate prisoner provides evidence for Farquhar’s hallucination being possible in the real world and not just fiction. Both stories start with the men facing inescapable death in the real world and escape to a fantasy where they can be happy, but in the end, nothing changed. 

When Peyton Farquhar stood off the edge of Owl Creek Bridge and desperately looked for some way to escape he hears what is described as “a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil … The intervals of silence grew progressively longer, the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness” (Bierce 5). The sound that he heard so loudly was his watch. The description of Peyton’s watch ticking are important because they tie into the events of Act Three and the hallucination. The purpose of a watch is to keep the time, every single second the little hand will move a tiny amount and it emits a tiny ticking sound each time. Time always flows at one speed and never stops, one second is always one second long and that never changes. Except this quote shows us that the intervals between seconds is growing each time Peyton hears the click. Well the seconds themselves aren’t getting longer but instead Farquhar’s mind is slowing down. Earlier in this essay the way it was possible for Farquhar’s entire dream to take place in a single moment was because the brain quickly assembles a story that start with the climax and fills in the details before that. By showing the ticking of the watch slowing down in Farquhar’s mind, Bierce is mixing the dream world and the real world together, he shows how the two are connected and the transition from one state to another. 

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge tells the story of an Alabama man living during the Civil War. The author Ambrose Bierce flawlessly mixes two different points of view of the  same story from different perspectives, the way it really happened versus the way the protagonist dreamed it happened. The reader is taken through a vivid dream world with action and adventure and a twist ending. This paper covered the ability of dreams to sync with external phenomenon, the ability of the brain to cope with its own mortality and create its own happy place, and the fact that the dream world created by Bierce is possible in reality. 
