Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and a Rose for Emily
Both an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and a Rose for Emily deal with the struggle between opposing forces. In Bierce's naturalistic story, the author depicts a struggle between the body and the mind of a dying man. Peyton Farquhar who is about to be hanged at Owl Creek Bridge, dreams in the few minutes before his death, that he escapes from the hands of his pursuers, and that he has a tiring and adventurous journey home. The journey proves to have been only a product of imagination, and at the end of the story, the reader realizes that Peyton had never left the place of his execution. What is actually interesting here is the struggle between his body and his mind: as he loses consciousness, his so-called thoughts are in fact produced by the sensations in his body. Bierce thus shows that the human mind in general is constantly affected by the body and the natural world.
Faulkner's story, a Rose for Emily, also depicts the struggle between two opposing forces, the natural world and the spiritual or moral one. 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 dead body of her former lover, whom she had poisoned herself. Thus, the struggle between the woman's desires and the opposing forces is now apparent: she stubbornly holds on to the memory of her father and to the body of her dead lover, unwilling to relinquish her feelings for them.
Thus, the two stories portray the struggle between the natural body and the spiritual side of man, resolving into delirium and pathological states.
Works Cited
Bierce, Ambrose. Collected Works. New York: Oxford, 1977.
Faulkner, William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1950.
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
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
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
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