Setting In An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge By Ambrose Bierce

Type of settings in: An occurrence at Owl creek bridge by Ambrose Bierce The fictional story written by Ambrose Bierce: An occurrence at Owl Creek bridge is a supernatural story which means that it is beyond natural. In a supernatural tale or any kind of literature text, the text needs a certain kind of setting that are unique to their text or author. The most important in the setting is the time the story took place, the social environment around the story and where the story took place. In this story, the notion of time is important, the character is running out of time. The place where it happened is important, if it didn’t happen where it did, the story would have been different if it would have occurred in a street or a tower, it would …show more content…
In this fiction text, time never seems a problem for Farquhar the main character. The whole story seems to be occurring in a two or three-day period, but to be honest; it does not. The time elapsed in this text is roughly less than five minutes. The author, Ambrose Bierce, makes time go by slowly by adding a part to the text that it is not even true, which is the supernatural event. The character is making us go through a long adventure of him escaping the soldiers that were hanging him on the bridge. He walked through the woods to get back to his family, which he describes as it took him a while to get there: “He must have traveled the entire night” (171-172). The notion of time tells us, the reader, a different kind of story. If the author would not have done the escape seems so long by telling us it took him a while to get to his family, the story would not have lasted more than a few lines or even a few minutes. The reason why the escape seems so long is because the character is running out of time, he is running out of time to get away from the soldiers and get back to his family because he is forgetting where he is and he cannot feel his legs anymore. He is defying the odds of escaping, we almost feel like we are in a rush to finish reading the story and see what happened to him after all. When someone is running out of time it seems like it is lasting longer, like it will never end. One minute the reader …show more content…
The few paragraphs that explain his life tell us that he has a wife and a house. The readers can also conclude that he is a wealthy man, owns a few slaves, and he always wanted to be a soldier in the army. Farquhar and his family were respected in his town, so he was not a monster or an enemy to the army and the men working on the bridge. With all the information given to us about Peyton Farquhar, the reader might feel like he knows him. However, would the story be different if we did not know how important or how wealthy the guy is? Yes, it would. Would we be rooting for a poor homeless guy making trouble with the law? No, we would probably say that he deserves it, he knew he was not allowed near that bridge or even on the other side of it, he deserves to be hung because it is the “law”. The role of the social environment here is to make us think that he should not be hung, and he should survive, he does not deserve all of this because he is a good citizen that always wanted to do well and to serve his country. His social environment also tells us that he always wanted to be a soldier, but was never able to. So did he do an act of rebellion just because he wanted to feel like a hero, the one that could escape an army and survive without being hang on the bridge? Yes, because from what we can see in the