S0685737 April 19, 2011 Comp111 Professor Meiers Short Story Essay II In A Flash It is a common phenomenon that when

a person is about to die, their life flashes right before their eyes. Some people have flash backs of all the good memories that they have had in their past, but in the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, the main character Peyton Farquhar has a flash of hope for his life to continue. This short story is about what you want yourself to be, rather than what you really are, or deception verse reality. Although the reader is tricked to believing that Peyton has gotten away in his extremely unrealistic escape scene, in reality it is his brain conjuring up what he really would have wished to happen, moments before his death. Although there are many clues throughout the text to give readers a faint hint that he is actually dying of suffocation, many people while first reading this believe the impractical idea that he actually escaped. As Stuart C. Woodruff puts it best, he claims, somehow the reader is made to participate in the split between imagination and reason, to feel that the escape is real while he knows it is not (Stoicheff). The reality of the story is that this man is going to die, but in his mind, and ours, he is able to struggle for his life and fight to get away. The whole story is meant to be a dream, or a twist of what could actually happen. The very extreme, detailed description of what Peyton is envisioning while he is hanging, is what his mind tricks him into believing. Details of Farquhar's death by hanging persistently intersect with

much of the description of his apparent journey, a journey that is actually a distortion of the sensation of hanging and not merely a disengaged reverie of his escape from it (Stoicheff). His dream is so illogical because his mind was deceiving him into believing that he could actually get away and escape, taking the brief idea he had right before he was hung, and running with it. According to many studies done on dreams and reality, external or objective phenomena that occur during our dream state can actually make a person believe that it is actually happening (Stoicheff). A good example of this is a study of dreams that was done in the nineteenth century by Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury. He offers the description of his own dream in which, after a series of related events, he is about to be guillotined during the French Revolution. At the culmination of the dream, he experiences a sharp pain in his neck, waking only to find that a portion of his bed has collapsed upon that region of his body, generating the grotesque sensation of beheading that concludes the dream (Stoicheff). This goes to show that every motion and feeling he was having while being strangled to death, made him feel like it was tangible, so feelings he was having during his lucid and otherworldly dream, seemed undeniably real to him in his mind. Throughout the story the very descriptive writing points out feelings Peyton had once the executioner had stepped off of the plank. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion (Bierce). Any thoughts that he was having werent because he was conscience, it was because his body still had feeling, while his brain was losing oxygen, and he began to hallucinate in his mind, what it would be like to escape his fate. He was swinging like a vast pendulum, literally and figuratively. His mind was racing going back and forth, coming up with irrational ideas, while his body was hanging underneath the bridge, swinging from a rope. Finally, when Bierce

tells us that Peyton had the power of thought restored, we begin to hear his escape route, when in already he is most likely already dead, with his heart not beating, just his brain shooting off into a dream before losing all consciousness. Many people can relate to this story, because one actually believes he might get lucky and that his crazy dream is actually real. One my find themself rooting for Peyton, being the underdog, or might even imagine themself put into that situation, thinking about what they would be feeling, and who their last thoughts would be about. One could only imagine that overwhelming rush of adrenaline running through them, trying with any fathom of their mind to maybe get away and be free to live again. When explaining why one might be able to have a vast situation play out in their mind before death, Stoicheff explains, within a short time period, sensation does not become effaced, but instead divides itself into infinite units of experience, saturating the mind with stimuli. From this perspective, "time" becomes vertiginous, the span of a second dilating to reveal ever increasing interior units of time, which themselves repeat the process of fractal division. Thus it may take "only" a "split second" for Farquhar to transform from a sensate being to an insensate one (for Farquhar is "as one already dead" within that short time, after all). This story takes dreaming one step further, instead of dreaming in bed at night while one is still safe, it takes the vivid dream of an attempted of escape from death. Every person can relate to this because we all dream and wake up wishing that something in real life would actually happen, similar to the dream we just experienced, whether it be a promotion at work, or just laying on the beach lazily with someone you care about. Our dreams all take us to a place we either want to be, or dont want to be, such as a nightmare, but in the end the common denominator is that everyone dreams, and wishes for things that may never really happen.

Works Cited Stoicheff, Peter. "`Something Uncanny': The Dream Structure in Ambrose Bierce's `An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'." Studies in Short Fiction Summer93 30.3 (1993): 349. Web. 15 Apr. 2011.