The Art of Trickery

It's been a number of years since I've read this story by Bierce, yet it still fascinates and dumbfounds me. For his time, his use of mystery and tricking the reader was generally unheard of. When one starts reading the story, it appears to the common eye as just another boring account of war-trials around the time of the American Civil War. However, at the climax and initial descent, it's much more than that: it's a reflection on life and how quickly it goes, and how unexpected events (such as your own hanging) can fool us into thinking we are experiencing something else. It's safe to say that most of us have had at least one "out of body" experience, where we are outsiders looking in at a particular situation that is going on at that time. For Peyton Farquhar, he was looking at both his life and death in retrospect, unaware that life as he knew it had been literally snapped away.