Right Before Your Eyes

Man’s perception of boundaries within the real world quickly changes when he realizes that the real world is being taken from his hands. Upon reading “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, I was slightly confused at the obviously exaggerated details of Farquhar’s various dramatic escapes. It then made sense at the very end when the narrator tells us that Farquhar is actually dead. People often wonder what it would feel like to know that you were about to die and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” opened that door of possibilities. I think that if one’s fate were obvious, they would try to end their life as best as they knew how. This is why people who find that they have terminal illnesses go sky-diving or choose to spend as much time with family as possible. Priorities are realigned, and people try to fit as much life as they can into their last days. Farquhar experienced this kind of last-minute readjustment, but in a very different way. Farquhar had no choice in how his life were going to end, so instead of changing the way he lived in the last moments, he had this fantastic vision of how it could have been. Rather than resign himself to the fact that he was going to die, his reality was completely altered, until, in his mind, he was escaping his fate. Though he must have known that there was no true escape, Farquhar died believing that he had beaten the odds, and had found a way through it all. In order to avoid his hopeless situation, Farquhar simply created a new one.