Ambrose Bierce – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

“Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.” (Bierce 139).

The last line of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” packs a heavy punch. I was in no way expecting such a shock; although it seemed that Farquhar’s imagined utopia was too good to be true, I found myself wanting to believe that he could somehow have escaped into it. Upon my initial reading of the last line, I found myself feeling unsatisfied – the line felt so cold and unsympathetic to me. However, I immediately started the story again from the beginning and found that through this last line, Bierce succeeded in making his reader care for someone that had many unfavorable qualities. Farquhar owned slaves and supported the confederate army, yet we are convinced through Bierce’s storytelling that we should pardon his faults and care for Farquhar as a father, husband and human being. When Farquhar imagines his escape, the reader finds themselves holding their breath, waiting for the moment when he is free and safe from the enemy even though Farquhar is the enemy all along. Our mind is taken to another place while reading Bierce’s story just as Farquhar’s is while he awaits execution. Upon my second reading of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” I realized that Bierce gave Farquhar these final blissful visions of his escape and his family in order to completely contradict the rashness of the story’s end. Bierce’s last line may bring a cold finality to the story, but certainly does not dismiss the notion that in his own mind, Peyton Farquhar found peace and freedom.