Going into this story with the context of everything said and discussed in our first class period gave me an entirely new perspective on reading from the very beginning. From the moment of “he closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children” I just knew that the rest of the story was going to represent a vision encompassed by a tiny snapshot of the last moments of this doomed man’s life. I think this knowledge was guided partially by the conversations had during the first class about how the narrator can be deceptive and portray a twisted or falsified version of the truth, but also just from instincts picked up from previous stories books or media that I’ve been exposed to. However at the same time, the actual affirmation of what I had internally believed from the start which concluded the story with the 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.” was almost aggravating to me even though I completely predicted it. It was as if I knew something was coming but I subconsciously wanted the author not to have the nerve to actually follow through with his trickery. Even as I saw what was coming, I still wanted to believe the author’s words and that Farquhar’s escapades were in fact rooted in reality.
One thing that I liked about that story is the set up with the conversation between Mrs. Farquhar and the soldier. This part really illustrated the broken timeline of the entire piece and was in fact a further tip off of the deceitful narrator in that the story clearly wasn’t following a consistent order of events.
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