An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge : Filters

Is it possible to tell a truth?

I’m honestly wondering. Every story, even the ones that are meant to be honest, leaves out little details that the teller thinks are unimportant. Or maybe the teller emphasizes certain events they deem relevant.

This editing has to happen, doesn’t it? When we live our lives we don’t think the same things as other people think or place the same importance on things as other people do, and so our version of what happened will be a version with entirely different focus than those of other people. If it’s a story, someone has to be telling it. If someone is telling it, then there is a filter between the listener and what actually happened.

For me, a lie is a manipulation of someone’s perception of events. Which leaves me in a weird situation — since that is also an accurate description of what the truth is, too, for all storytellers.

The twists of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” work because the author plays with the filter between unadulterated truth and the reader. That filter is the perception of Farquhar, the main character. Even before Part II Farquhar leads me to be fuzzy on some facts. At one moment the narrator describes the stream below as “dancing madly”, the next Farquhar thinks how “sluggish” it is. Farquhar listens to the ticking of his watch and the narrator describes its “regular” rhythm, and the next moment Farquhar starts thinking it is getting slower and increasing in strength until it doesn’t sound like a description of a ticking watch at all.

So of course Farquhar misleads the reader in Part II, when the narrative gets more directly inside his head. The author, Bierce, lets us see things the way Farquhar sees them, emphasizing the details that Farquhar would deem important, even when what he thinks contradicts other parts. Bierce even told the reader that this shift in who controlled the narrative was about to happen at the end of Part I.

Sure, what we read from how Farquhar perceives things is incredible in detail and very human in many little ways, and that makes it resonate with the reader. Sure, Farquhar was acting as a filter for us to understand events, but we as human beings can only hear stories through a filter.

So was his way of seeing things a lie? Or was his perception of the moments before death one of many possible truths, even as it seems entirely opposite to what happened? How close can we get to the real truth with a story?

(Or is there even one real truth?)