An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

Bierce’s use of stream-of-consciousness narration predates modernism writers of psychological fiction such as Virginia Wolfe, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. This writing technique allows the reader to experience what is happening from moment to moment in the mind of the protagonist. Bierce plays with how time is experienced to create the stream-of-consciousness effect. In doing so, the reader believes that Farquhar’s perception of reality is true. Bierce sets this up in the first part of the story when he shifts an objective third-person narration to Farquhar’s point of view. At this moment, Farquhar closes his eyes to think about his loved ones but is disturbed by a ticking sound. Bierce writes, “And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion” (7). The sound turns out to be his watch, which Bierce emphasizes uses to show how Farquhar’s perception of time has slowed. He is becoming anxious as he awaits his fate. The narrator says, “He awaited each new stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening” (8). With his rising anxiety and fear of death, time slows down.

Farquhar’s perception of reality is defined by what he knows and is filtered through his feelings. Clifford R. Ames states that the reader “cannot depend upon time to be constant in the narrative since time is a function of the narrator’s perspective, and this perspective is unpredictable” (Ames, Clifford R. “Do I Wake or Sleep? Technique as Content in Ambrose Bierce’s Short Story, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.’” American Literary Realism 1870-1910i, vol. 19, no. 3, 1987, pp. 57). Farquhar’s thoughts and feelings are subjective, and the reader cannot trust the perspective. But because Bierce starts the story as though it is a historical account of a hanging, the reader is inclined to believe that what Farquhar is seeing is real.

Bierce provides no transition to alert the reader that he shifts the point of reference from the exacting mind of the narrator to the mind of the condemned man who desperately attempts to extend time by psychologically expanding the intervals in which action takes place. Farquhar experiences his reality in slow motion and yet his mind is racing. This is contrasted with the slow and deliberate narrative from the initial perspective that experiences time at a normal rate.

Farquhar’s escape sequence shows that Farquhar is at once aware that he is dying and how his mind creates walls to cope with the overwhelming situation. The reader believes that Farquhar has escaped, but there are moments when what he is experiencing doesn’t add up. For example, the narrator says, “He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands […] He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck” (13-14). Farquhar is aware that his hands are breaking free, but he looks at them as though they are not his. Later, when he hears the cannon, it is likely the sound of his neck breaking. His mind perceives these moments through the delusion of escape.

At the end of the story, the tense shifts from third-person past to third-person present. He experiences the last moment of life in the present tense as though he is waking from a dream. He sees his house and, the narrator says, “as he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments’ his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him” (20-21). At this moment, Farquhar’s perceived reality comes to an end. It allows Bierce to show that a person’s mind will concoct stories and walls to cope with reality. Ames notes, “When the dream state collapses into the painful reality of historical time and consequence, he […] feels […] the staggering recognition that can come only at the point which experience ends” (Ames 53). Time as the reader knows it has caught up to Farquhar. Farquhar’s life has come to an end and with it all experience.