Entry Eight: Bierce

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Ridge"
Ambrose Bierce (1890)

"His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth
into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue -- he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!"

This is another story we’ve read that’s knocked the wind out of my by the end; there’s so much about it that I appreciate about this short story. The style, the tone, and most importantly the paradigm shift at the end, which took my by surprise almost immediately. Perhaps I was just hopeful Peyton had survived, but I still can’t stop thinking about this ending.

To begin, I’d like to mention the flow of this story, the seamlessness that aids to the suspension of disbelief. From reading the first sentence to the last one, I didn’t catch on any immediate change of setting or thought process. Peyton’s fight to live was strong throughout the entire narrative, and not once did I honestly question it. I found myself wanting the main character to live, even though every aspect of his situation wouldn’t allow it. I was rooting for the underdog because I wanted nothing more than his freedom.

Which then leads me to the most important and complicated point I’d like to really think out, which is Peyton’s death. For practically four pages of the story, our main character is dead in his current timeline. But we’re brought about on this journey with him; we fall into the river, free our bound hands, we swim and dodge bullets until we flee into the forest. Throughout his struggle, his fight, I believe that it’s all symbolic of what he goes through before he passes.

The pain anyone goes through while being hung must be excrutiating, and I can only imagine that the imagination-driven journey we’re brought on is Peyton’s mind. His thoughts are distancing himself from the intolerable pain that’s been inflicted upon him.

This kind of story has been told and retold – someone creates a fantasy because the real world was too much to handle. Specifically, I think of the Doctor Who episode Asylum of the Daleks. Clara has manifested her entire mind to believing she’s shipwrecked, when in reality she’s been modified into a dalek all along.  She even drew others into her fantasy, because the horror of what had happened to her was too great to bear.

For Peyton, the reality of losing his life with his wife and children was too much to handle; instead, his mind let him imagine he’d gotten away. The quote above, to me, is the proof of this; physical symptoms of being hung are showing in his fantasy, right before he goes and “sees” his wife. It’s the last sign of his humanity, before he passes on to see his family.