Ambrose Bierce S Skill at Short Story Writing Is Extraordinary Essay

Owl Creek Bridge

I have researched and written many essays and scholarly papers on the Civil War, and have nearly come to tears reading deeply personal stories by those who witnessed the carnage and bloodshed. The Battle of Gettysburg (in which 51,000 men lost their lives) seems unreal today, but it kills the heart to read about the horrific way in which a soldier slowly, painfully dies when stabbed with a bayonet, or shot in the torso with enough harm to bleed to death. But reading Bierce's short story, while very real and compelling, is in a perverse way an escape from the horror of that war that took over 600,000 lives, because a reader can come to the conclusion that Bierce's narrative is just fiction and may be a trick, a hoax, slight of literary hand -- but a very clever one that sucks the reader in emotionally in any case.

When the ticking of a watch becomes a "sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil ... " the reader knows that the narrator is building up to something terribly dramatic. When a man is about to die, or a reader believes he is about to die, every sound of course is magnified enormously; the river below is louder than it really is to others, and when -- with a noose around his neck -- the prisoner falls.

But does he really fall? The way in which Bierce sets the scene is so graphic and so brilliantly specific of every possible piece of the environment is in place, is like he is setting the reader up for something unexpected. And it turns out, he is!

The men are at "parade rest" (which in the military means they silently wait with weapons on shoulders) and they "they might have been statues to adorn the bridge" (8). All that description, the silence, the stillness, seems to be like a frozen painting of a bridge with evil about to be unleashed. The author personifies death itself, which is chilling and yet a great bit of fictional narrative:

"Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference" (8).

The ironies are many and poignant in this short story. While waiting to be hanged, the man "…