An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Response

I was in the library last night huddled at my cubicle on the second floor when I opened the webpage titled An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I expected a short story with a fairly simple plot, and that is what I got. So I read, copied and pasted from the webpage into a Microsoft word document, all nine pages of the short story. My initial reaction to the reading would have been right on track if the class was either English 101 or History 101. I followed the events of the story as they read and did not look any deeper. I analyzed Farquar’s character from a third person narrative, and asked many of the same questions I am sure my other peers asked. Why was he being hung? How epic was that escape story? After reading the last line, “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge” it caught me off guard, but I did not think too much about it. Farquar was dead, and so was the story.
Following the discussion in class, the story I read the night before was far from dead. The author Ambrose Bierce used a technique I have not been faced with before. He manipulated the reader by creating the narrator who then told us the story of Peyton Farquhar. How does the narrator know the facts? How does he know the thoughts of Farquar when watching from a ways away? If watching at all? The real question that arose in me was, maybe we encounter more situations like this while reading then we think. That manipulation and lying to enhance the story is a common practice, most readers do not know how to interpret it, leaving them with the conclusion of the story like I had viewed it at first. Bierce did a good job making it seem like he knew what was going on through the narrator’s eyes.
My point is, I bet if I were to revisit many short stories and novels we have read perhaps they may not be as true as I thought they once were. A very important point that Andy Shnacky proved in his blog post was “the power does not lie in the hands of the narrator to relay the story to us”. He mentioned at one point it comes down to the reader’s interpretation of the text and the reader’s responsibility to determine what is real and what is not. It does not lie in the hands of the author to spell it out for the reader. So in class when the discussion focused on “what the author did” and “what the author is doing” maybe it is not really the author doing anything at all, it is us the reader failing to determine what is real and what is not.