DANCING DRIFTWOOD IN "AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE"

AMBROSE BIERCE'S "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) depicts the heroic delusions of a citizen saboteur as he is being hanged by the Union army. Peyton Farquhar believes -- as do the readers -- that he has escaped execution and, under heavy gunfire, has made his way back home. But by the end, he is dangling from a rope, his adventure unceremoniously squelched. Bierce does more in this story, however, than play with his readers' assumptions. "Owl Creek Bridge" is also a case study in Farquhar's moral deformity.

A generation earlier, Edgar Allan Poe, with whom Bierce is often compared because of their interest in the psychology of the grotesque, had begun to investigate the deformities of self-engrossment, that wayward spirit of independence so determinedly American, like Emerson's glossy and self-reliant Yankee or Dickinson's brooding "Soul" that seals itself up in a vault of its own society. Milton, battling for the character of his own England during civil war, considered narcissism the precursor to anarchy. Satan is indicted in Paradise Lost (1667) as intractably "self-roll'd"; he cannot see beyond himself, a failure that darkens all of hell. Poe translates that hell of narcissism to a pitch-black apartment in which the speaker of "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) murders his landlord, whose "evil eye" has "vexed” him. The problem is that the speaker can't shut up. Indeed, having exploded in a confession to the police, the convict now adjures his audience to "Hearken! and observe how healthily -- how calmly I can tell you the whole story." Even as he pleads obsessively to be judged sane, his maniacal focus on the audience's eyes upon him mirrors his previous obsession with his victim's. The madman is continually hanging himself -- and hanging on to himself -- with his tongue. [1]

In "Owl Creek Bridge," the protagonist's self-aggrandizing narrative appears, at first, to be perfectly realistic and reasonable. [2] We know Poe's speaker to be mad from the start, but Farquhar seems only to have bitten off more than he could chew -- trying to burn down a bridge used by Union troops -- so we forgive him for his error and indulge his final delusion. Bierce, however, does not. In fact, subtly though not always discreetly, he is hanging him for it. Why? Because Farquhar is an impostor. Genteel southern ideals about noble soldiering -- "the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction" -- have loomed over Farquhar like father and judge. [3] They have been the vexing eye upon him, despite the absence of any condescension or condemnation from his community. In a bit of narrative reflexivity, Bierce's description of the man mirrors Farquhar's own warring consciousness: praise and sympathy -- Farquhar "was at heart a soldier" -- mixes uneasily with cryptically subversive commentary: "Circumstances of an imperious nature" had kept Farquhar, a well-to-do, politically-connected plantation owner, out of the war, apart from the "gallant" actions of soldiers, immobilized by "inglorious" and "humble" spectating (307). What "imperious" circumstances might prevent a wealthy politician from enlisting? The author's innuendo soon verges on mockery: when the soldier requests water at the house, Mrs. Farquhar, says Bierce, fetches him water "with her own white hands," nobly abasing herself in "aid of the South" (307). But nobility in the Farquhar family is always faintly ridiculous. The "thumbnail burlesque of martial rhetoric," as F. J. Logan describes Farquhar's delusory heroics, is established almost from the beginning of the story. [4] Bierce comments that the patron himself, "without too much qualification," accepted "the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war" (307).

Toward dubious glory, then, as a guerrilla soldier, Farquhar has sought out the "great quantity of driftwood" that the disguised Union scout had told him one could ignite under the strategic Owl Creek Bridge (308). This sabotage will release Farquhar's true "energies," which the "inglorious restraint" of his having escaped -- perhaps dodged -- the Civil War has thus far suppressed (307). These supposed "energies" thus become the very substance of his fantasy escape. When Farquhar is hanged, his senses, like those of Poe's narrator, expand and deepen to become "preternaturally keen and alert"; they are "exalted and refined," recording phenomena "never before perceived" (309). Farquhar notes the minutest sensuous details of his surroundings and acquires astounding abilities, dodging and deflecting bullets ("Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away" [311]), shrewdly calculating the timing and trajectory of cannon fire, and noting arcane military tactics. Farquhar has finally become a heroic soldier, "himself the pivotal point" (310).

Most readers grow suspicious by the time Farquhar cries, "God help me, I cannot dodge them all!" (311) -- a point that confirms the fantastic nature of his escape even as it foreshadows its collapse. Having fled the river and arrived at the street leading home, Farquhar hears "whispers in an unknown tongue" (312), and at that word -- "tongue" -- Bierce returns his protagonist to the reality of his hanging, contracting the play of Farquhar's preternatural senses to the image of his tongue swelling and thrusting forward. The strange "whispers" he had been hearing were, in the clinical perspective of asphyxiation, the gasps emanating from that same tongue. Farquhar is literally choking on his own tale.

Farquhar's demise has come not through a beating heart, the "tell" convulsing in Poe's madman, but through eyes that bulge and cannot close and through a tongue that whispers a tale of vanity. Why is Bierce so unyielding here? Perhaps because Farquhar's vanity is deeper than we suspect. Back on the bridge, awaiting his execution, Farquhar was given one final moment to consider his moral plight -- perhaps to focus on the family he had abandoned for his warrior's adventure: "He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children" (306). But this narration actually occurs from within the fantasy already begun. His "last thoughts" before hanging were not of his family at all. On the bridge, having noted the swiftness of the stream's current, Farquhar has observed a pivotal object floating upon it. This is the "tell" Bierce gives us. Time and space are suddenly altered, and Farquhar thinks, "What a sluggish stream!" (306). His dream begins, perhaps before the hanging itself commences. Fittingly, the object floating down the stream is a "piece of dancing driftwood" (306), the very same driftwood that, had he succeeded at burning it, would have served as the crowning instrument of his heroism. Torching that driftwood would have rescued Farquhar from a life of indistinction, illuminating the gallant knight of the Confederacy. In this moment of willful misperception, however, the man's character turns grotesquely inward, toward a final self-absorption and delusion. Everything after that point is dancing driftwood, the idealized story of heroic piety. Farquhar thus adopts the stock portrait of the chivalrous southern soldier, the fearless patriot who, dwelling faithfully on wife and children, faces death with stoic endurance -- and he rewards himself with a perilous escape.

Apart from the question of why -- and when -- Farquhar enters this fantasy, Bierce's story would amount to little more than an entertaining gimmick. But the driftwood becomes a metaphor for Farquhar himself. Like Poe's insane narrator, Farquhar needs eyes upon him (a visual motif continued by the "Owl" moniker), so, upon his demise, he retreats not merely to southern pieties about caste and chivalry, which his and his wife's "white hands" have exploited, but to the private vanity he has kindled from them. [5] His enthrallment with the driftwood, fantastically distorting his perception of time and space, pre-empts any final reconnection to his life in a real world. This is Bierce's most concentrated realism, unmasking the vainglory and personal arrogance of a Romantic culture.

Unlike Poe's narrator, Farquhar becomes his own vulturous eye, simultaneously judging and exalting himself. As hero manqué, his self-image is concocted not for his country or his family but wholly for reflection of himself. The Union soldier, for example, who, on the bridge, fires at Farquhar, has gray eyes not simply because such eyes, which Farquhar believes to be the "keenest," increase the risk to him, nor simply because Confederate soldiers wear "gray" uniforms (310); the soldier has gray eyes because Farquhar's own eyes are "large and dark gray" and must therefore be equally keen (306). [6] Farquhar is populating his world with his own eyes. This mirror vision, like a Lacanian double, confirms his ideal stature within the fantasy. So he becomes his own seer, watching himself serve valiantly on both sides. Bierce hints at this conflation by referring to both players anonymously, as the "man": "The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle" (310). With his gray eye looking squarely at himself and with his mind's eye stuck fatally on the dancing driftwood, Farquhar never leaves the world to which his vanity has led him.

Bierce allows his readers to believe in Farquhar’s fantasy because it builds on sentimental conventions about war, in which glory is a flash of fire away. And southern military idealism is archetypal because it evokes ancient European chivalric codes. Poe diagnoses the narcissism at the root of evil, but Bierce, if only briefly and cryptically, applies Poe's insight to an entire culture. From beginning to end, the man of driftwood, dead inside already, floats on a romantic dream, lost in the imagined blaze of himself. Repentance, reflection, confession, moral protestation, love of friends or family or children -- these are all just props in the narcissistic dance. So Bierce chokes his protagonist's grandiose fantasy back down into the proportions of a footnote, a meager "occurrence" in which a minor bridge survives a vain and inglorious man.

WORKS CITED

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., Scott Elledge, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992); Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe: Selected Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 177.

2. Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967),122. To identify the primary distinction between the writers, M. E. Grenander argues that "Poe's tales of terror are nearly all simple in plot and cumulative in their emotional impact; Bierce's best ones are complex in plot and involve an element of irony . . . [which is] cruelly inappropriate." In Bierce, the reader shares the narrator's reasoning, which turns out to be "wrong." So our terror mirrors the narrator's once we discover the faulty assumption. Poe's narrators, by contrast, exhibit a "self-conscious coyness" that we detect, says Grenander. The reader thus remains protected from the fault. See Grenander, "Bierce's Turn of the Screw: Tales of Ironical Terror," Western Humanities Review 11(Summer 1957), 259.

3. Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Ernest J. Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 307. All citations hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.

4. Logan, F. J., "The Wry Seriousness of 'Owl Creek Bridge.'" American Literary Realism 10 (Spring 1977), 104. In his perceptive, if strident, essay, Logan describes Farquhar as "foolhardy . . . callous . . . stupid." Even the language reflecting Farquhar's thought-processes ("gallant," inglorious," "opportunity," "distinction," and "adventure") reads as a "thumbnail burlesque of martial rhetoric." See 103, 104.

5. In "Something Uncanny," Peter Stoicheff sees the escape from the hanging and the subsequent emergence from the water as a Freudian wish-fulfillment. Farquhar wishes so desperately to suppress the "literal fact of death" that he reconfigures the event as a birth: "the external stimulus of suffocation by hanging is revised here to become [while Farquhar is in the water] the baby's sensation of the umbilical cord around its neck." See Stoicheff, "'Something Uncanny': The Dream Structure in Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'," Studies in Short Fiction (1993 Summer), 355.

6. See Logan, "The Wry Seriousness of 'Owl Creek Bridge,'" 110.