An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

Ambrose Bierce’s use of stream of consciousness explores the psychological effects of dying. Instead of focusing on the hanging, he pushes the reader to explore how the mind copes with the death of the body. He places his protagonist, Peyton Farquhar, in a liminal space: The Owl Creek Bridge. Farquhar thinks, “If I could free my hands […] 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” (8). He came to the bridge to become a hero for the Southern cause, and now he is about to lose it all.

The narrator says Farquhar originally believed that “no service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier” (9). As he awaits his fate, however, he wishes to return home to his family and friends. Scholars Sharon Talley and Peter Stoicheff take a Freudian view of the story. They see Farquhar’s wish as a desire to return to the safety of the womb. The rope becomes the umbilical cord strangling the unborn child. As he takes the rope off, Farquhar worries he will be labeled a coward for not dying with dignity, but the fear of death outweighs the rhetoric of glory and heroism.

Bierce uses an experimental narrative to explore Farquhar’s need to survive. He moves the reader from the spectacle of the hanging to the internal workings of the hanged. Part 1 begins with the objective view of the hanging and then moves inward to the character’s thoughts. This movement creates interest in what the man did and why he deserves to be hanged. Bierce answers this question in Part 2 where the reader learns that Farquhar was duped into attacking the bridge.

Bierce uses the literary device of stream of consciousness most fully in Part 3. He plays with both time and space creating for the reader a false sense of hope. Farquhar has apparently survived, and he is fighting for his life. Farquhar’s perceived reality is presented to the reader as factual reality, albeit a dreamlike one. Bierce manipulates time in this section by speeding up the narrative. As Farquhar’s mind is racing his escape is moving quickly. This contrasts with the slow-moving narrative at the beginning, which documents every detail of the hanging. Farquhar’s escape is so dramatic in comparison that the reader does not stop to ask if it is actually happening.

The story explores what happens to the mind when the body is dying. Bierce shows that the mind attempts to fight for survival. Farquhar knows his neck is in pain, and he feels the physical sensations of the noose, but his mind refuses to believe that he is dying. His mind allows him to find a way to cope with his fear by pushing to survive even when it is hopeless.

At the end of the story, Bierce shifts to the present. Farquhar sees his wife “looking fresh and cool and sweet” as she “steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps, she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity” (21). The narrator then relates Farquhar’s death in the present tense, saying, “As he is about to clasp her, he feels a stunning blow upon the back of his neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence!” (21). He made it back to familiarity and safety. In Stoicheff and Talley’s reading, he has made it back to the womb and the comfort that it brings.

The stream of consciousness comes to an end as Farquhar sees a flash of white light, and all goes black. The reader learns that Farquhar has been hanging the whole time and that what they experienced is Farquhar’s perception of reality, in which he escapes and gets to go home to his wife. Death is final and the reader is confronted with mortality. The mind will do everything in its power to escape the finality of death, but in the end, death is victorious.