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Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and a Rose for Emily are quite similar in the style of writing. Essentially, Ambrose Bierce's an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, is a naturalistic story, masterfully describing the death by hanging of Peyton Farquhar. The point-of-view alternates from the omniscient narrator to the free indirect speech of the main character. The story has a surprise ending, since the reader realizes that the apparent adventure for escape that Peyton has been through was actually a delirium of just a few minutes before he died. Thus, by suppressing conscious thought and reducing his character to the mere sensations and delirium before death, Bierce emphasizes the importance of the biological frame of man for his intellect. Thus, Bierce effectively shifts from the omniscient point-of-view to that of the free indirect speech, beguiling the reader into thinking that the adventure of Peyton really takes place, as described from the point-of-view of the narrator. In the end, the author comes back to his omniscience and the reader realizes the adventure was only a delirium caused by the sensations experienced by the dying body. Faulkner uses an unusual point-of-view: the first person plural, the point-of-view of the community in which Emily Grierson lived. Faulkner combines modernism with a few naturalistic elements in his story: Mrs. Emily's life is witnessed from the outside by the community, and the reader has no access to the story itself, but through the hearsay of the country folk. A Rose for Emily also has a surprise and grotesque ending: after Emily's death, the people find in one of the rooms of her house the body of Homer, Mrs. Emily' lover. Thus, Faulkner's style is very interesting, because he tells the story from the point-of-view of an ignorant narrator but impersonal narrator, the community itself, leaving the reader equally ignorant. Both stories thus have naturalistic or pathological elements and manage to keep the reader at a distance from the story itself.
Works Cited
Bierce, Ambrose. Collected Works. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Faulkner, William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random Hous
Peyton Farquhar is not a soldier, but a wealthy plantation owner who was attracted to the possibility of dignifying himself by being of service to the South during the civil war. Tricked by a federal scout into trying to do something heroic for the South, he is about to hang from the bridge that he intended to burn. Bierce describes Farquhar's experience as one of extreme agony, followed by hope
The author lays more stress on depicting the emotional journey of Farquhar, which results in a subjective treatment of time. From here on there is a slow down of time and the narration at times begins to be fictitious. As Stuart C. Woodruff a literary analyst puts it, " somehow the reader is made to participate in the split between imagination and reason, to feel that the escape is
Mrs. Emily is described from the point-of-view of the townspeople as a very haughty person, respected by everyone because of her noble origins. Her refusal to pay taxes as well as all her other whims and peculiarities are accepted by everyone. When she dies however, the same community is shocked as they realize Mrs. Emily had entertained a perverse obsession during her secluded life, and has slept with the
Ambrose Bierce is not a preacher, and he does not preach through his stories. There are no good or evil men in this tale, and readers hoping for a moral, or even a strong sense of moralism, should stop at the noose in the third sentence, for this is all the moral Bierce will give you explicitly. What is, is, this story seems to say emphatically, and ironic, strange, or
hanging is a means of execution," this topic will be further elaborated and explained with the help of the examples from a short story written by Ambrose Bierce.This short story includes the subject which is "hanging," the examples from the story would be provided in the paper so as to back up the arguments which will be included in the paper. Hanging has been utilized as a mode of execution
Emily Grierson and Ambrose Bierce In works of fiction, traditionally the sympathetic characters do actions that are heroic and those that are supposed to be unsympathetic perform actions that are decidedly less so. Given that humans are very judgmental creatures, authors have tried to change reader perceptions by providing plots where characters that may perform unspeakable acts are arguably the most sympathetic creatures in the piece. It is difficult to see