The classic tale An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce follows the story of protagonist Peyton Farquhar on the day of his execution. The short story does an excellent job of recreating a Civil War era conflict between the Confederacy and the Union which ultimately leads to the demise of our protagonist, a Confederate sympathizer. This senseless loss of human life commonly occurs in war zones and times of political unrest. Killing in war is often overlooked and justified as a means to an end or seen as a necessary evil but the loss of any human life is a tragedy that should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, Peyton Farquhar loses his life this way and leaves his family behind, a wife and small children. However, that’s not what happened in Farquhar’s mind, while Peyton stood off the edge of Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck he dreamt an intricate and action-packed escape sequence where he falls to the river below, gets to safety and reunites with his family. The reason this miraculous escape seems too good to be true is because it is and Peyton Farquhar never left Owl Creek Bridge alive. The truth is not revealed until the final sentence of the short story where a twist ending admits that the whole adventure was just a dream. The tragedy that is the loss of human life, through war and the death penalty, and the protagonist’s elaborate and realistic dream stand out as two vital concepts to the story and deserve their own analysis. By referencing modern day examples and academic studies of these concepts a greater understanding of their significance to the story and our own lives will be discerned.

The dream world in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a critical part of the story and its where a large part of the story takes place. 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 flashback in Act Two and coincidentally it’s exactly what we see happen. This is not because Farquhar got incredibly lucky, but because Bierce has changed the narrative and tells the story of a dream Farquhar is having in the moment before his death. However, the dream experienced by Farquhar is different in nature to the dreams every person experiences every night. The dream that raced through Farquhar’s mind existed only for a millisecond in time before the noose snapped his neck. How is it possible that Farquhar imagines such an intricate dream the spans over a full day, when in reality only seconds passed. One explanation for this phenomenon comes from a nineteenth century study of dreams which Peter Stoicheff references in his analysis of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The study set out to explain how the events of a dream could seem to match up with or predict 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 medieval execution machine, but his bed simply collapsed and a piece of the headboard landed on his neck resembled the feeling of the blade pressing against his neck. The climax of the dream being perfectly in sync with a sensation caused by his bed collapsing suggests that either dreams possess an uncanny ability to sense the future or they react to the sensation when it occurs. 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 the ability to predict the external sensation but instead react to it. The theory states that “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 milliseconds that his body felt the noose around his neck this theory explains how such a dream could be possible and even documents a case of a similar dream happening inspired to physical stimulus on the unconscious body.

The events are the dream are very unusual too because the dream follows a chain of events that a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie might feature, except An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is set in the middle of the Civil War and meant to tell a serious and realistic tale.  And since the Third Act isn’t revealed to be the imagination of Peyton Farquhar until the very last sentence. We are lead to believe that the escape happens despite how absurd it sounds. Peyton was trapped on a 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). Guarded by a small army of Union soldiers with a noose tied around his neck escape seems impossible, 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. Bierce does a great job of convincing us that the escape is real, and he does it by manipulating the emotions of the reader and making Farquhar out to be a hero that was tricked by his enemies and sentenced to death. Peyton Farquhar is described as good looking man 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). In modern day culture society loves a handsome and rugged hero who must overcome adversity, defy certain death, and live happily ever after. Bierce makes the dream feel real by literally making us cheer for the hero of the story to triumph, and consequentially ignore all the clues to the contrary. Also, 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 readers can relate to makes us feel more connected to Farquhar and the dream. The everyday experiences and emotions of our world made the dream feel more grounded in reality, thus making it easier to believe the dream is real. By adding those clear and specific feelings helps us understand what Farquhar is feeling and creates a more real and vivid world. When most people dream at night the topic of the dream is usually random, missing any real feelings and nothing able to be felt by the senses, you can’t taste or smell something in a dream. So by describing the pain felt by Farquhar when he fell off the bridge and describing the fragrance of the blooms in the forest Bierce further separates Farquhar’s experience from a typical dream. Finally, Bierce describes Farquhar reaching the safety of the forest, describing it as “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 creates a false sense of security. At this point in the story the assumed climax of the hero’s journey is complete and he is returning home. This is done just so that the ending comes as more of a surprise, Bierce gives the reader exactly what they want, the hero is victorious and the action of the story is over, now for the happily ever after. Again, Bierce is manipulating the emotions of the reader to celebrate the hero overcoming adversity. The story is structured like any fairy tale where the hero gets into trouble yet always wins at the end of the day. Bierce plays off that desire of desperately wanting the hero to succeed to convince everybody that the dream is real, but at the end of the tale Bierce pulls back the curtain to reveal that Farquhar was dead the whole time.

The death of Peyton Farquhar was a tragedy and the loss of life is not something that shouldn’t ever be taken lightly. Every major religion teaches the sacred value of human life and denounces murder. Every countries’ government puts laws in place that make any kind of murder illegal. This is important because an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge takes place during the American Civil War where the loss of life, military or civilian, is very prevalent and Peyton Farquhar is just another victim of this. The value of human life is difficult to explain because it is just inherently known to us, either because of the shared feelings and emotions that humans feel or because we all possess consciousness that makes us aware of the consequences of death and fear of the unknown. We also assign value to human life because of our ability to feel empathy for other people and understand their shared fear of death. We understand that everyone lives intricate and detailed live just like ourselves and no one wants to die because it means that their story on earth comes to an end. After death no one knows if they will see their families and friends again and they will never get to experience all the joy that life on Earth has to offer. It’s also possible we assume human life to have some sacred value because of instinct to keep the species going. Either way, war has the terrifying ability to strip millions of people of their lives. For example, out of “2.5 million men enlisted in the Civil War, 750,000 died” (Stec 4). “Numbers play a fundamental role in how we learn about and remember wars” (4) but raw data such as number of casualties fails to convey the real cost of war. Each of those 750,000 men who died either had something to live for after the war, either friends, family, or making a life for themselves. The sadness and grieving of families of fallen soldiers is not accounted for. This isn’t even mentioning the men in 1.75 million survivors who returned traumatized or undocumented civilian casualties. Peyton Farquhar is among those undocumented deaths because “measuring civilian casualties engages moral and practical questions” (Stec 5). When soldiers die that is expected and even justified by society because the claim that they knew what they were signing up for. However, when civilians die from a war its because they were forced into a situation where they died because of the decisions of other people. Before declaring war “citizens must engage in a discussion of tradeoffs and moral compromises. What sacrifices are worth it to achieve success in the war? How many civilian casualties are acceptable?” (Stec 5). “The discussion becomes muddied when the topic of civilian casualties is brought to the table, because they are not often framed in the initial promotion of a war “(5), meaning that they could be accidental casualties or innocent people that died because of a decision to declare war. The idea of innocents dying as a result of a decision you made is difficult to accept because it reveals the true destructive nature of war the impact that taking a life has. When a government wants to go to war with another nation they appeal to the citizens by showing of gigantic armies and military equipment, but this type of thinking devalues human life because it takes away the individual person hiding behind a set of numbers. Some instances of war cannot be avoided, like World War II and the Holocaust, but before declaring war all people must be aware of the value of human life in every soldier and civilian that die as a result in order to reduce the amount of senseless bloodshed.

The best way to reduce killings is to remember that every life has intrinsic value. Most domestic murders in the United States result from petty conflict and offenders are punished to the extent of the law. However, the extent of the law many times is government sanctioned murder known as the death penalty. The morality of the death penalty is still widely debated today. Prisoner condemned to death are classified as the worst of the worst, responsible for atrocities of all kinds. Despite the atrocities committed by death row inmates, capital punish condemns prisoners for their actions but hypocritically responds with the same action. All people desire to live and be free, and while freedom may not be possible, it is inhumane to kill another person even if they have done the same. Prisons should operate with the purpose to rehabilitate inmates and correct immoral behaviors instead of disposing of undesirable people.

So, when Peyton Farquhar stood off the edge of Owl Creek Bridge he reacted to impending demise by desperately searching for way to escape. With no way to physically escape his bonds and no hope for surviving the execution Peyton’s mind created an alternate world in his dream where he could escape. This method of coping with certain death also appears in death row prisons in the real world. Stephen E. Tabachnick explores a study of Charles Darwin in which Darwin discovers dreams similar to Farquhar’s in death row inmates from London’s famous Newgate prison. In 1836 Charles Dickens visited the famos London prison and talked to 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. 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. Darwin is evaluating the “situation of a man, spending his last night on earth in this cell” (Darwin 1246) and “follows the possible escapist hopes and dreams of a generic condemned man” (Tabachnick 2). Darwin describes these dreams as “re-creation of the man’s fears, hopes, and dreams—not the report of a truth that has indeed occurred” (Tabachnick 2) because the dreams are a representation of the prison’s emotional state, fear of death, hoping to escape. Basically, the dreams of the Newgate prisoner and Peyton Farquhar are manifestations of their fears and desires and the brain trying to escape.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge tells the story of an Alabama man living during the American Civil War. The author, Ambrose Bierce, creates a likeable character in a life or death situation and the action filled adventure that allows him to escape certain death. But at the end of the hero’s journey Bierce pull back the curtain to reveal the whole escape was only a dream and Peyton Farquhar died as a casualty of war. He brutally and honestly exposes the tragic consequences of war by creating an intricate and likeable character that we grow connected too throughout the story and simply killing him at the end. He presented the reality of war and demonstrated the bloodshed that we often overlook. By forcing the reader to grow to like Farquhar this short story also depicts the sorrow felt by friends and family when a person dies. Through the use of an elaborate dream sequence allowing our protagonist to escape Bierce also shows the basic human desire for freedom and safety. At the end of the day An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge shows the horrors of war, the human desire to live, and shows us that behind every casualty a human being exists.
