Owl creek bridge
1. Bierce mingles realistic details with poetic imagery. What effect does this have? What at first seems to be the constant flow of the execution taking place in the present moment? Composed on the brink of the bridge. He shuts his eyes, a sign of him slipping into his own kind of reality, one that is relieved by any duty to laws of time. As the ticking of his watch slow down and more time passes between the strokes, Farquhar drifts into a timeless realm.
2. Did you feel prepared for the story's ending? Why or why not? No, because from the beginning till the end of the story Bierce created this illusion and reality. We the reader was not mindful of any division between them Farquhar's illusion is, for us as the audience, reality. He creates his imaginary world out of despair just like he was about to die, and assuming his escape is a way of reclaiming control over the facts of his current state.
I took this photo of a document I own
Lottery ticket to raise money for Queen's College ...
Ambrose Bierce, American author3. Consider the point of view from which each section of the story is told. How does the three-part structure reinforce the theme of the story? There are three parts as mentioned already, and each section varies in point of view, with interesting uses of this literary element. In the first section, the omniscient narrator is employed, so the narration tells the reader all about the character and event, supposedly; in the second section, objective narrator is used--this narration is more like an objective report; and in the third section the narrator switches to third-person limited, in which the thoughts and feelings of a single character are the focus. Perhaps Bierce uses these three vantage points to present the complexities of the human mind. Bierce's story depends too much on...