Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 in a log cabin in Ohio. The family's poverty forced him into menial labor while still a younger teenager. He extracted himself from that situation when, still a teenager at the outset of the Civil War, he enlisted in an Indiana infantry unit. He served for all four years of the war, fought in several battles, was twice wounded in action, and rose through the ranks to become a staff officer. After the war, he worked for many years as a journalist in San Francisco, but he also published short stories. In his time he was known as "bitter Bierce," his generally bleak outlook having been formed by his war experience at the beginning of adulthood. In this respect he resembles, for example, Hemingway, who is said to have admired his short fiction. Bierce had a kind of sidelight of composing word definitions exhibiting his subversive intelligence and impatience with conventional pieties. These were eventually collected and published, first as The Cynic's Word Book and then, expanded, as The Devil's Dictionary, which is probably his best known work. A sampling:
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are. . . .
LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. . . .
MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
NEGRO, n. The piece de resistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.
POSITVE, a. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
His definition for "longevity" ("[u]ncommon extension of the fear of death") seems an apt port of entry to his most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The setting is a railroad bridge over a stream in northern Alabama during the Civil War. The "occurrence" is a hanging. The condemned is a southern planter who has been tricked by a federal spy into trying to burn down the bridge, which is the crime for which he's being hung. As the story opens, a good deal of attention is devoted to the method and machinery of the execution. Farquhar, the condemned planter, stands on a plank in the center of the bridge. His hands are tied behind him. There is a sentinel at either end and a company of Union soldiers for an audience. The rope around his neck is secured above him to a bridge cross-timber. There is enough slack in the rope so that it curls at his knee before looping up to where it's tied around his neck. We are told that he is unhooded and that no bandages cover his eyes. The plank he stands on is balanced across some railroad ties. A Union officer stands on the other end of the plank. When signaled by his superior, he'll step aside and the hanging will occur by a teeter-totter action: Farquhar's end of the plank will tilt down and he'll fall backwards between two ties, but the rope is short enough to keep him from getting wet. The narration proceeds imperceptibly into the consciousness of Farquhar, who reflects: "The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective." And: "He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts on his wife and children." Before entering Farquhar's consciousness, his appearance had been described: mid-30s, pleasant features, pointed beard, grey eyes, kindly expression, a well-fitting coat.
This is a horror story. Just intolerable, and it gets worse:
Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the smoke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or nearby—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
It seems then that heightened physical sensations are an aspect of the stress-induced phantasmagoria, which include punishments that ought to be mutually exclusive: the awful sound is both near and far, a stereophonic hell. Since the source is his ticking watch, it only seems that the intervals are longer. The intention of all this cannot be anything other than to arouse in the reader a mixture of sympathy and hopelessness—and a wish for escape.
And the wish is granted! Farquhar falls, the rope jerks, injuring him, but it also breaks and he's in the water coming to his senses. He frees his hands. The soldiers shoot and miss, the splatters of water made by the bullets striking his face. The horror story is now a kind of exciting get-away drama; as has been said, nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. He dives and swims, dives and swims, the stream carries him into a wood and safety. He strikes out on foot, has minor adventures, is lost, finds his way. The story of how he came to the Owl Creek bridge is told in a flashback. Finally he finds a "straight road" that takes him back to his home, the "wide white walk" to a verandah where his wife is waiting. She steps down to greet him, he means to embrace her, and then the story ends:
As he is about to clasp her, he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him, with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
So the escape interlude was an extension of the hallucinatory quality of the ticks of his watch. It all fit in the time required, after the Union officer stepped off one end of the plank, for the slack part of the rope to get taut and snap his neck. Bierce describes an unbearably cruel situation, grants the reader's wish for an out, only to reveal that the escape was a hallucination—the situation was as hopeless as realistically described at the opening. I can understand someone complaining about having been manipulated, tricked. That one can make out the effect the author is going for—darken the darkness by allowing some artificial light before flicking it off—tends to diminish that effect. But not altogether. Why did Bierce make the condemned man for whom we sympathize a Confederate rebel, a member of the planter class? It wasn't on account of his Gone-With-the-Wind sensibility. Probably if the Confederates had been hanging a Union sympathizer it would have seemed too much like a partisan statement relating to the late war. The Confederates are so wicked! The Union men so noble! That wouldn't do, because Bierce wanted to paint everyone and everything in the same bleak color.
The story, which was originally published in the San Francisco Examiner on July 13, 1890, can be read online here.
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