Swinging Gently

We all have been played.

That's what Janelle tells us, that we're all being manipulated. Now, that's what Ambrose Bierce shows us.

Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"is a rather unsettling story because it calls into question our understanding of reality. Throughout much of the story, Bierce constructs the reality of the story on the basis of the powerful imagery used to describe Peyton's experiences in Part III. This world seems so real because we are allowed to experience it. We feel the torment of the noose strangling him, the cold and darkness of the river (4), and the uncomfortable warmth of a sinking bullet on his neck (6). We can see "the individual tress, the leaves, and the veining of each leaf" (5). We can smell "the fragrance of...blooms" (6) along the river bank. We even feel the love Peyton has for his wife as he glimpses her "matchless grace and dignity" (7). We experience the world as Peyton does. Everything seems so real because we can feel it all. And so we accept it, allowing our senses to convince us of a concrete reality.

But we are wrong. The reality we seemingly experience, the reality of the story our senses tell us is real,  is torn out from underneath us only to show that we readers have been deceived. All along, Peyton has been hanging from the noose tethered to the beams of Owl Creek Bridge, swinging "gently from side to side" (7) with a broken neck. Because the rope had never snapped, he never felt the cold waters of the river below, nor did he smell the vernal odors of the river bank. He never even saw his wife one final time. The rope remains intact, tethering him and the reader to the true reality of death.

Thus, we have all been played.

How easily our senses are deceived! How seamlessly we allow ourselves to be manipulated! Yet this is our nature. The human body is weak for we desperately must rely on our senses to construct a reality and the world around us. We unceasingly cling with any sensation, any odor, any sight, to anchor ourselves. Yet when our senses are removed, when we can no longer see, hear, feel, smell, or even taste, we are untethered. The rope snaps and we are left to helplessly adrift through world like ships lost in a storm. Our senses are our lifeline. Without them, we know and are nothing.

However, if we rely on our senses so much yet they are so effortlessly deceived, then how can we ever know what reality really is? Whether it is the world of a story or the world we live in that we refer to, how can we ever be one hundred percent sure that the world really exists as we experience it? How do we know that the way we see the world isn't the consequence of manipulation?

The truth is, we can't be. At the end of "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", we aren't sure whether everything we just experienced is real or just a fantastic lie. We are full of doubt, wondering where the truth lies. Likewise, in life, we are constantly wondering if there is more to reality. Is this not, after all, the foundation of religion, the very basis of faith? Thus, this story does not merely question our understanding of some arbitrary fictional reality. The real-world implications of such a question instead confront us with deeper philosophical disputes that we cannot necessarily grapple.

So we are left hanging, swinging ever so gently on the tether of our own reality.