Peyton Farquhar In Ambrose Bierce's A View From The Bridge

The author of this piece of literature, Ambrose Bierce, writes about a man, Peyton Farquhar, who is being hanged for trying to interfere with the railroad. The author describes the story with a detailed description of everything the man could see just before his death. If you take away all the detail then the story is basically telling it’s readers that Peyton is getting hung for interfering with the railroads, which is boring and contains no real deep meaning, but when you look at all the details in the story you can see that the author is stressing the importance of life and how precious it is. Moments before the captain steps off the wooden board to hang Peyton, he daydreams about the situation and thinks of how he would have liked that moment to go. He fantasized about the rope breaking just before it tightens around his neck as he plummets into the water underneath the bridge. When he falls into the water he is able to get out of the ropes and swim far away from the railroad and ends up on shore safely.
When Peyton reaches the
It’s hard to tell if he started his daydream since the moment he was caught or if it started when they placed the rope around his neck and the captain stood on the board waiting for the soldiers to take his belongings out of his pocket, but I think he started drifting into his own version of a perfect reality when he closed his eyes, moments before the captain released his foot off the wooden board. There are parts of the story where he rushes through explaining (when he was in the river escaping) and then there are parts that are slowed down (when he reached the shore). In the slowed down moments, Ambrose is trying to emphasize the parts of life that we may take for granted, Peyton takes another look at life and appreciates it just seconds before he