Thursday, January 18, 2007
Ambrose Bierce II
Katja
ENGL 48 B
Journal #5, Bierce II
18 January, 2007
"He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!" (Ambrose Bierce 456)
Ambrose Bierce’s short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge would be a great story for creative writing students to work with. The text is full of examples of tension and foreshadowing; the story arc is perfect and the metaphors solidly classic. This quote refers to when Peyton Farquhar is dying from hanging but his end-of-life hallucinations take over and offer up another version of reality.
The sentence is a complete scene in itself. Farquhar falls into the water and subsequently emerges as illustrated above. Bierce obviously—and with no shortage of irony—uses the rebirth motif to illustrate the most lucid and life-changing event in Farquhars life, i.e., his death. The explosion of this one brief and next-to-last instant of this man’s life invites the reader to ponder the speed with which life passes us by. The amount of happenings in this one moment in Farquhar’s life is astounding, but not unlikely. I believe that our marvelous brains are capable of creating this sequence of events. The moment’s psychological impact on Farquhar is so massive that his mind independently conjures up a scene easier to deal with than reality itself. It seems like some type of built-in self-preservation.
Bierce challenges his readers intellectually and emotionally. His writing strikes me as modern, given what they knew about science and brain function at the time the story was written. Perhaps his time spent in battle pushed him to believe in some layers of psychological protection during a person’s time of death.
ENGL 48 B
Journal #5, Bierce II
18 January, 2007
"He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!" (Ambrose Bierce 456)
Ambrose Bierce’s short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge would be a great story for creative writing students to work with. The text is full of examples of tension and foreshadowing; the story arc is perfect and the metaphors solidly classic. This quote refers to when Peyton Farquhar is dying from hanging but his end-of-life hallucinations take over and offer up another version of reality.
The sentence is a complete scene in itself. Farquhar falls into the water and subsequently emerges as illustrated above. Bierce obviously—and with no shortage of irony—uses the rebirth motif to illustrate the most lucid and life-changing event in Farquhars life, i.e., his death. The explosion of this one brief and next-to-last instant of this man’s life invites the reader to ponder the speed with which life passes us by. The amount of happenings in this one moment in Farquhar’s life is astounding, but not unlikely. I believe that our marvelous brains are capable of creating this sequence of events. The moment’s psychological impact on Farquhar is so massive that his mind independently conjures up a scene easier to deal with than reality itself. It seems like some type of built-in self-preservation.
Bierce challenges his readers intellectually and emotionally. His writing strikes me as modern, given what they knew about science and brain function at the time the story was written. Perhaps his time spent in battle pushed him to believe in some layers of psychological protection during a person’s time of death.
# posted by Katja @ 2:40 PM 
