Journal # 1: Ambrose Bierce

Tara Phillips
English 48B
Dr. Lankford
January 7, 2009

"The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed" (From An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce)


Summary:

The suggestion that the man in the water could see the eye color of the gunman from such a great distance is one of many indications of either a supernaturally heightened sense of sight, or merely a hint that the events of the man's survival are merely a delusion.

Reaction:

As I read, I hoped and believed that the man would somehow actually survive, and that he would return home to his family and somehow successfully live out the rest of his life in hiding. After all, one always hopes for a happy ending, and Bierce successfully demands sympathy for Peyton Farquhar by letting the reader in on his admirable human qualities, and never mentioning his actual crime. Sure, he alludes to it casually in the scene where he is asking the soldier about the possibility of a civilian getting "the better of the sentinel," but aside from that, the reader is led to believe that in some patriotic attempt to interfere with the North's reparations of the railroad, Farquhar was caught, and is being hanged for it.
There were many examples of the heightened senses vs. supernatural reactions that I mentioned above, such as the mere fact that a normal human body should not be able to endure the beating that Farquhar's did. he fell several feet, was strangled by a noose, if even for the short time before it supposedly broke, and he was under water for a long period of time. He was also unconscious for long enough, the reader would think, that he might have suffered a significant loss of oxygen to the brain and therefore brain damage. He was then eventually washed down the creek and tossed against rocks, but I suppose the creek was a "lazy" one and maybe he wasn't tossed so hard. It's also unlikely that all the shots fired would miss him, especially with the gray-eyed marksman shooting at him, and the cannon that was fired at him. One might think as he reads that there is some divine intervention. Maybe the bullets and cannons are missing him because a higher power is ensuring his survival, which again alludes to the supernatural.


Two sections of my mind played a tug of war with me as I continued to read An Occurrence. Although I hoped for "happily ever after," I had the nagging suspicion that it would not be so... In reading about "Bitter Bierce" and his overall cynicism on Wikipedia, I assumed that he did not produce a lot of happy endings, and that despite the struggles of Farquhar, he might not make it. The skeptic in me said that it was all too unreal, but the optimist let me keep hoping that Farquhar would make it, and that this would be a happy story. When it comes to literature, one can absolutely hope, but I conclude that Bierce was a realist.