Hello! Welcome to the start of the Foundationals series, where I’ll be going over the very, very basics of plot, setting, and character through doing deep dives on a few short stories (and possibly screenplays). This post will focus on plot!
Now, the word plot is thrown around a lot, and it has developed many definitions. When we say, “Wow, that book had a really good plot”, we can mean a number of things: pacing, twists and turns, premise, etc.
For our intents and purposes, plot will be defined simply as what happens in a story. And as mentioned earlier, there are numerous components for plot, including but not limited to structure, conflict, pacing, POV, etc. Additionally, plot oftentimes, if not always, blends in with setting/world building and character and theme. I think these are important considerations to keep in mind while we analyze these short stories for their plots— the term and its content has a very fluid and interacting nature.
Today’s post will be on “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce! Please keep in mind that I am by no means an expert on matters of literary analysis; these are simply the thoughts of a high-schooler and should NOT be taken as gospel.
In case it isn’t obvious, the rest of the post will contain spoilers for “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. If you want to read the short story, here’s a link!
Summary
The story starts off with an unnamed man facing his impending execution by hanging. Surrounding him are soldiers (from the Federal army) with rifles ready in case anything goes awry. In his final moments, the man indulges in imagining his miraculous evasion of enemy soldiers and escape back to his family.
Getting the Hang of Beginnings and Promises
In this first act (yes, the story is split into three acts! Bierce is certainly making my analysis of plot easier), the initial premise and conflict is introduced. Through the immediate opening to action instead of preluding narration, Bierce chooses the style of in media res, where the plot begins by plunging into a critical event.
I think this really effectively introduces a hook for the premise. Personally, I’m no history or Civil War enthusiast, so I need something that grabs my attention. Naturally, a dramatized hanging suffices.
Here, Bierce does another crucial thing with his plot— he makes a promise to the reader. In order to craft suspense and keep the reader engaged with plot, writers need to make promises to the readers. In this case, the promise is that something is happening with this hanging. And with some highly intellectual deducing, we can guess that it’s something along the lines of
A) The main character gets hanged
or
B) The main character escapes
It looks suspiciously simple, but it just goes to show that promises don’t need to be convoluted to be engaging. The suspense of not knowing what will happen keeps readers glued to the story.
Furthermore, I think it really helps plot when writers craft the promise in a way to genuinely show a lot of significance for the character. For our character, the resolution to this promise literally has his life hanging in balance. Therefore, our desire to see the answer to this promise and how it affects our main character compels us to finish the story.
For the Love of Foreshadowing
Bierce also employs some foreshadowing for his plot (although I’m not honestly not too sure if this is retrospective since I’ve read this story a few times before. I’m trying to eliminate retroactive bias, but humans, myself included, are sometimes notoriously bad at that).
An instance I see would be his remarks about the river.
“A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!”
Here the contemplation of something floating down the stream seems to speak to the unconscious fantasy of his own escape and juxtaposes later where he is wildly, improbably rushing down the stream. Furthermore, I think other cases of meticulous detail betray the fact that something important is going to happen there that might subvert our expectations (twice!) An example of this would be the lengthy attention paid to the ticking of his watch— it’s such an innocuous detail, but it induces a very dire reaction in our main character and sets up the important plot point of his heightened senses.
I think this is a very interesting strategy where authors can subtly draw attention to something or signify its importance later in the plot by spending more time and detail on it as a little foreshadowing.
The first act ends abruptly with the sergeant stepping aside, presumably sending the main character off to his watery grave.
Back to Context
Most stories follow the structure where context appears first and the actions of the story happen afterwards; however, since Bierce chooses to use in media res to start the story, he has to later go back and fill in the context gaps.
In the second act, we learn our character is named Peyton Farquhar, and he is a slave owner and “ardently devoted to the Southern cause.” This glimpse into his character, a loyal and almost zealous civilian who is willing to go to extreme lengths for his cause, helps explain his motives and gives us a better understanding of how he sets off the action in the plot.
I think the technique of properly introducing a character after significant amounts of action has happened to them already is very fascinating. It forces the reader to reconstruct their perception of both the character and the plot with a lens that is informed with this new information. I think this would be a very effective technique for introducing an unreliable narrator or shifting reader perceptions between the “protagonist” and “antagonist”.
Wait for it… Dramatic Irony
Bierce builds suspense in the finale of the second act through dramatic irony. This is when we the audience knows something that the main character doesn’t. Due to this additional information about the events and context, we view the character’s actions very differently. In this case, we know that Peyton is about to be duped very thoroughly.
Although, it’s important to note Bierce’s twist on dramatic irony because he first shows us the results and then explains the actions that caused those events. However, I think the dramatic irony still works extremely effectively— although we already know the outcome, we still have that “epiphany” or “aha!” moment when we realize the soldier is a Federal scout.
Finally, I think Bierce’s use of the literary device in the second act is very well placed; it helps heighten the suspense and avoid the dreaded “middle act lethargy”, especially when his middle act literally interrupts the action for a well done but nonetheless lengthy info dump.
A quick intermission to appreciate the beauty of Bierce’s prose:
“He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation...”
And back to your regularly scheduled show…
Atmosphere and Tension
While reading the entire third act, I was most struck by the masterful tension, in particular even when there were a lot of descriptions. Large chunks of descriptions run the risk of being unbearably boring; however, when cleverly employed, they can evoke a great deal of emotion and tension.
In this case, the thorough details of everything from the prismatic dew on blades of grass to the gray colored irises of the sentinel add an almost other-worldly, dream-like atmosphere to the scene. You may be wondering, what does this have to do with tension?
I direct you back to the section on foreshadowing above, where an almost suspiciously scrupulous level of detail was paid to certain events that signified their importance. In this third act, the elaborate descriptions and their atmospheric echoes command our attention; in a way, this is Bierce’s way of foreshadowing for the ending where we realize the whole sequence of events was all a last-second fantasy for Peyton.
Yes, the events are filled with tense action: the frantic struggle in the water, the evasion of bullets, and the long trek home (it’s worth noting too that Bierce uses many types of conflict here— human vs. self, human vs. human, and human vs. nature). But why add the paragraphs of description of locusts and roseate light, then?
Because this is Bierce’s cue to us readers to realize something’s not right here. This kind of underlying tension from the harsh juxtaposition between the ethereal atmosphere and dramatic escape for own’s life adds additional anxiety while reading.
The Ending
The shocking plot twist of an ending has cemented An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as a classic short story, and it’s also partly why I chose this story for a deep dive on plot.
Going back to the concept of promises, I think part of what makes this plot twist so effective is that Bierce makes a promise to the reader. Then during the third act, where we’re expecting a resolution, he gives us the answer— Peyton escapes.
As readers, we mentally accept this and start forming our conclusions of the story. But at the very last moment (also shout-out to his timing of it right before Peyton reaches his wife, which is just impeccable), Bierce switches answers. This throws our whole perception out the window, which is why it’s such a stunning plot twist.
Some people might feel cheated by this answer, and indeed the “it was a dream all along” trope has received a lot of flak in recent years, but I think Bierce executed this perfectly. It isn’t some kind of last-ditch effort of “she has an evil twin sister”; it carries plot significance and weight because as readers we’re forced to reevaluate the entire third act (and probably first two as well). Furthermore, it doesn’t discount or waste any of the previous plot and character development; in fact, it adds a new layer of depth to our understanding of the story. For instance, the dramatized description of the watch in the first act takes on new significance as it goes to foreshadow and show again how in his last moments, Peyton’s heightened senses and turbulent mind concocted a desperate fantasy.
And that’s a wrap on my plot deep dive for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge! Hope you enjoyed it and look forward to my next deep dive on setting!
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