Important Elements To An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

An important element to this short story is its circular plot structure. The way it is revealed is actually quite brilliant. The story is made into three parts; it interchanges from the present to the past and back to the present. The first part of story opens up with "A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees" (Bierce 83). This is the framework created for the story. The railroad bridge that the man is standing on in the opening of the story also turns out to be the same bridge that the man dies hanging from in the third and final part of the story. When reading this first part a reader might wonder right away who this man is and what he could have possibly done to deserve this type of punishment. Though, the who and why is not revealed in this part, a reader will soon discover the details of the events leading up to Peyton Farquhar's doom. It is unfolded in the second part. It is also reveals what kind of man Peyton Farquhar is. As the second part of the story shifts into the opening of the third part one might immediately believe he is a goner for sure when he falls through the railroad bridge. But wait! He manages to escape with just an exceedingly sore neck and heads toward his plantation, offering great reprieve to a reader. As he is about to greet his wife at the gate of his own home he takes a blow to the back of his neck. Instead of dying from an actual cannon at his home and perhaps in the arms of his wife, like a reader might have thought, he is dead wit...

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...ature. Even though Bierce does include things of which are unreal a reader can simply miss them after reading about all the realistic aspects. Without these immaculate verisimilitudes, a reader would find this story less captivating. Nor would a reader feel much sympathy for an average man just wanting to support what he believes in. The ending would be less shocking either, had Bierce not include such phenomenal verisimilitude. The verisimilitude locks readers in the story, therefore it is an important element.

Without these three most important elements, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is just a simple hanging for treason committed during the Civil War.

Works Cited

Bierce, Ambrose. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Robert Zweig. 10th ed. New York: Longman, 2012.

83-88. Print.