“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Originally I planned to write my blog post about something different entirely, but after the discussion in class today I changed my mind. When I read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge I did not think that either side of the story was a lie. I believed that the narrator’s straightforward view of the hanging and the vision in Farquhar’s head both happened as described. Neither perspective was a lie; nor do I actually think Bierce lied to the readers, he just mislead us to make the story more interesting.

As I mentioned in class today, the narrator told us the truth in the last sentence of the first section; Farquhar’s idea of escaping death and being reunited with his family was never materialized. However the first time I read this line, I just kind of passed it by. I wanted to know Farquhar’s backstory and since the second section flashed backward in time, it didn’t seem too fishy that the story could continue after Farquhar had (almost certainly) died. By the time I finished reading the second section I was distracted by how Farquhar was deceived by the Union soldier and I had almost completely forgotten about the line in the first section where the story had essentially ended.

But really, the story did not end immediately after the soldier stepped aside and let Farquhar fall to his death. Farquhar probably did not die instantaneously from the hanging; it took a few seconds for him to actually die. In those few seconds it is my opinion that the story the narrator conveys in section three actually did happen in Farquhar’s mind. These few seconds felt like a day to Farquhar, and I think that neither Farquhar nor the narrator lied to us in section three. The events in this section happened…in Farquhar’s mind. His thrilling escape and journey home were true, to Farquhar. Time slowed down for him and his last few seconds of life were actually a day, to him. So in my view, the narrator was not lying when he/she conveyed the events Farquhar believed were happening, the narrator was just conveying the truths as Farquhar saw them.

I know in class today we discussed whether we thought the narrator just made up Farquhar’s thoughts, whether the narrator was actually omniscient or not. But that would just mean that there is a story inside of a story and if we questioned if every story we read was real or not, reading fiction would not be interesting. If I asked myself if all of the events in Harry Potter were really just made up by a sad little orphan living in a little cupboard under the stairs, what fun would that be? We know that fiction is not real to begin with, so if we question every character, every line of text, we might lose the experience of being drawn into a story. Sure Bierce could have been trying to trick us by having the narrator fabricate a story, but why does that make the story any less significant? It is still just a story created by someone, whether it is the narrator or Bierce himself. It is still technically not “true” any way you look at it. We could say that Farquhar never existed, that no one actually died at Owl Creek Bridge, that maybe the narrator fabricated the entire story. But I just don’t see the point; I don’t think it really matters whether Farquhar or the narrator actually created the events in section three. We have to believe something or there is no point in reading a work of fiction.

As Dumbledore said to Harry in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” What Farquhar did in his last few moments of life may have been inside his head or maybe just inside the mind of the narrator, but that doesn’t make it any less real.