An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

I chose to analyze the passage that starts "As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward." In this paragraph, similar to the ones we read in class, Ambrose Bierce changes verb tense from present to past and back to present. In the first sentence Peyton is falling through the bridge and Bierce says that he is dead. However, the next sentence states in past tense that Peyton Farquhar was awakened, which is a liminality. Peyton cannot be both dead and alive at the same time, so when the author says Peyton is awakened maybe these are actually Peyton’s thoughts right before he dies, rather than his postmortem thoughts.
Bierce makes time ambiguous throughout the story and especially in this paragraph by alternating verb tenses. When Bierce uses past tense to describe how Peyton feels after he was awakened, maybe this description is referring back to something that occurred earlier in the story right before Peyton was hanged. Bierce seems to use imagery that might suggest that Peyton’s soul is in heaven by describing Peyton as “encompassed in a luminous cloud…without material substance.” Also, earlier in the paragraph Bierce says that Peyton “had power only to feel” so maybe he was in heaven right after he died in this section of the paragraph. However, Bierce creates an ambiguous situation when he says Peyton’s “power of thought was restored” because that creates the illusion that Peyton is still alive since he has the ability to think.