Owl Creek Bridge Foreshadowing

Irony is one of the rhetorical devices in which it it uncovers the difference between the truth and something expected. Predominantly, it detects the misconceptions or the unfairness of a specific situation. (http://figurativelanguage.net/Irony.html) Most of the time, Frederick Douglass used irony in order to uncover the defect in the reasoning of the issue of slavery. For instance, in the third chapter, Douglass made a description about the obssesive care of his previous master named Colonel Lloyd on his horses.

He goes out of his way to perform services to support the Confederate cause. One day, a gray-clad soldier appears at his house and tells Farquhar that Union soldiers in the area have been repairing the railroads, including the one over Owl Creek Bridge. Interested, Farquhar asks if it is possible to sabotage the bridge, to which the soldier replies that he could burn it down. When the soldier leaves, it is revealed that he is a Union scout who has lured Farquhar into a trap, as anyone caught interfering with the railroads would face

The description of the setting and of Farquhar’s surroundings makes up for the lack of character interaction. The men who hold Farquhar’s life in their hands are superficially described, but are very flat characters. Irony- Farquhar is being put to death for a crime he did not commit. He is being executed on the bridge that he intended to burn down.

The author used his want of freedom as a symbol of his gruesome death. As Farquhar is actually being hanged, he imagines falling to his freedom. The author says, “ The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced line had power onto to and the feeling was torment”. He feels pain of the rope around his neck and the burn of his lungs from not being able to breath. As Farquhar hits the water he starts to sink, but soonly rises up.

Before we reach the climax, the author gives the reader real news that leads up to it. Fahrquhar wasn’t allowed to be in the army, and he believed, “no service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South.” The soldier tells Fahrquhar that the driftwood was too “dry and would burn like tinder...”. He was told “any civilian caught interfering..will be...hanged.” The reader assumes that Fahrquhar will try and attempt to burn the bridge in help of the

This creates an incredibly miserable and isolating concept. However, Bierce has a difference use of tone describing the emotions of Farquhar. He wrote, "The intellectual part of his nature was already effected; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment"(Bierce 294). Bierce adds an unreliable perspective that foreshadows the ending that things are not as they appear. The shifts in tone also call attention to Bierce’s manipulation of the narrative.

For example, when Farquhar was tricked into going to the bridge by the soldier, Farquhar did not recognize the possible trap he was falling into. Foreshadowing was used right after Farquhar had been hanged, after he fell he found that his “neck was in pain,” and he was “lifting his hand to find it horribly swollen,” (Bierce III). This example may hint at the fact that the end of Farquhar's dream sequence is coming and he has ultimately died. Moreover, when Farquhar fell he “lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened,” (Bierce 8), this shows that Farquhar is already dead and that anything after this is his dream sequence before death.

Bierce describes the boards as being laid loose, and the bridge is “temporary.” We all know that life doesn’t last forever, but the execution taking place here proves just how short life can be. The bridge supports Farquhar and is the only thing preventing him from dying. We can make the connection that the bridge represents Farquhar’s life. The bridge stands above the river that Farquhar will be dropped into when he is hung, when he drops in it is him crossing the border of life and death.

It was an interesting idea to have this person be a part of the opposing side, but Bierce still made the reader feel for Farquhar, the one who is hanged on the bridge. The final twist of the short story is that Farquhar did indeed die, because it makes it seem like he could have escaped and then revealed that he had been dead. This section of the story could have come from Bierce’s near death experience at Kennesaw Mountain, where he could have died from the gunshot that struck his temple. Just as Farquhar’s life flashed before his eyes, Bierce’s life must have flashed before his. This is just one of many instances where Bierce’s own experiences show up in the short story.

Any individual who wraps up the story realizes that Farquhar is dead. In any case, they additionally realize that he appeared to do a lot of living in the seconds in the middle of hanging and passing. By and large, the topic of death is profoundly identified with that of time and forms of reality in this story, in light of the fact that the division 's experience in the middle of life and demise is super subjective for

Ambrose Bierce explains the water below Farquhar’s feet with such extreme detail that one can imagine the “'humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, [and] the strokes of the water-spiders' legs” (Bierce) reading the story. Using this technique helps the reader further focus and comprehend the message of the short story, the cruel Civil War is romanticized. In addition to the imagery, Ambrose Bierce’s well known short story also includes a significant theme of the contrast of a soldier’s glory with the reality of war. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Farquhar enters a dream-like delusion of escaping the bullets and his unavoidable hanging, only to be suddenly awakened by the reality of the cruel situation- he was going to be hanged. Bierce creates Peyton Farquhar as a character whose romantic ideals blind him from the harsh truth of war, and therefore contributes to the overall theme contrasting the idealistic mindset of soldiers and the gruesome reality of

Throughout the course of the story, the author takes the reader back and forth between time and has a strange flow of it. As readers, we found out Farquhar’s name and what happened after he fell through the bridge. It connects back to how Farquhar tries to manipulate time and reality but ultimately leads to his death. By moving between the present and the past, it shows how much Farquhar lacks control of time. In the story, Bierce writes, “The sergeant stepped aside.

The use of irony helped move the plot along, and it made the story easy to read and follow along with. Irony helped show that in times of war, sides don’t exactly matter. You could be a patriot, but then be killed by your own friends, or you could be a loyalist and be killed at the hands of the British. During war, everyone must care for

Peyton Farquhar, enters a deep daydream during the fall, he is imagining what would happen if he was not deceased. His aspiration is that he will receive the freedom to get back home to his wife and children. Farquhar experiences many indications of how he wants his future to turn out. “To die of hanging at the bottom of the river!--the idea seemed to him ludicrous” (Bierce, 4). When Farquhar finally gets loose and is on his journey back home, he was experiencing the pain from his bruised neck.

In the same way as a dream is hard to differentiate between what is real and what is fiction Bierce's “occurrence” is parallel to the symptoms of a dream. Especially because in the story we are told ahead of time that Farquhar is dead, but we chose to ignore it because we still see signs of life in which pushes him in an attempt to escape. The story says, “As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge, he lost consciousness and was as one already dead”(pg 602). Bierce uses his literary techniques so well that he even tells us that the character is dead, but still manages to trick us into believing he is alive until the very end. On that very same page after having been told that he is dead Bierce says, “He was conscious of motion” and just like that we are sucked back into this illusion of forgetting the past and its reality.