Literary Devices In An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge from the very beginning, people know a man is about to be hanged. This short story written by Ambrose Bierce takes place during the Civil War when an execution by hanging was normal. While awaiting his hanging, it seems that Peyton Fahrquhar, the man being convicted of tampering with the Union’s railroad, escapes his death. Bierce does a phenomenal job at keeping the reader on his or hers “toes”. Ambrose Bierce is able to transmit a sense of shock by foreshadowing Fahrquhar’s future through different uses of literary techniques. Through the literary technique of allusion, Bierce is able to show Fahrquhar’s end is approaching by associating it with biblical references. Fahrquhar, as mentioned in the beginning paragraph, is being hanged in this short story. The noose which is entangled around his neck is the one of the evils that killed him. With lines like “the noose about his neck was already suffocating him,” shows that the rope itself is evil. A snake in many cases is seen as evil, and in the bible the snake is the one who tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to eat an apple from the tree. The snake in the story of Adam and Eve suffocated those two from ever having a
The watch, which had been taking from him by the soldiers, was heard in his mind ticking repeatedly. This moment symbolizes his life being taken from him and ticking away. Water below the bridge in the beginning symbolized the freedom he had when he “escaped”; “By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home”. On page 12, “the bright morning sunshine” and “the open gate” he pushed open symbolizes the bright lit entrance into heaven. Taking a close look at the text the readers can find symbols and correlate them to Fahrquhar’s outer body