Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce had an “unhappy childhood and as adult he cut himself off from his parents and all but one of his siblings.” His life full of tragedies and conflict are very much reflective in his writing of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Chickamauga because “Bierce seemed disappointed with what had been, displeased with his present condition, and pessimistic about what lay ahead.”

Bierce writes in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Chickamauga, about the protagonists escaping their current unhappy situations, such as Peyton Farquhar escaping the moments before his hanging by letting “his gaze wonder to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet” and the child in Chickamauga “straying away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved.” Both of these situations could be based on Bierce’s real life: “Perhaps the fascination with the supernatural that he displays in his fiction is similarly an attempt to escape the ordinary society of humanity he claimed to detest.”

In Chickamauga, Bierce writes about a child seeing the effects of war for the first time: “The child’s eyes expanded with wonder; even his hospitable understanding could not accept a phenomenon implying such vitality as that.” When Bierce was young, “The Civil War broke out and Bierce volunteered for the Union Army. Bierce later defined war as a byproduct of the arts of peace and peace as a period of cheating between too periods of fighting.”

In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, I can’t help but wonder when Peyton Farquhar thinks to himself: “To be hanged and drown that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair,” if Bierce is reflection of the death of his elder son a year earlier than the publication, because his son “was shot to death during a fight over a girl.”