Summary-NO

Bierce was born in rural Ohio to a family with 12 brothers and sisters. When the Civil War began, he enlisted in the Union Army and lived through many battles.
 * Ambrose Bierce**





[|Ambrose Bierce]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, was a novel telling the story about a man facing death by getting hanged off a bridge. The story takes you into the imagination of a man named Peyton Fahrquhar who dreams about escaping and cheating death and running for freedom. The reverie that he was generating in his mind starts at the same scenario he was at in the beginning of the story: He was standing on a block of wood at the side edge of the bridge, prepared by his executioners to be killed when the command was given. Once he was pushed off the bridge the rope snapped off and he fell into the creek. The desire he had to live gave him the strength and potency to swim his hardest down the stream as he was being shot by the soldiers who surrounded him. As he reached land he laughed in joy for escaping and cheating his death and then he began to run far away from the soldiers and as he was running he had vivid hallucinations of his wife waiting for him to come back to her. As he finally imagined his wife in front of him at that exact moment that he tries to touch her the dreamlike sequence ended rapidly. The story switches back to reality, and the reader can see that Peyton had actually imagined everything, and was now dead.
 * __Summary of the Novel__**

Realism is evident in the story by the way that Bierce writes. He was a very dark and pessimistic writer, and his story clearly mirrors these traits. If he had been an optimistic writer, Peyton really would have survived the hanging and would have escaped the freedom. It is perhaps Ambrose's views on the civil war that are portrayed in An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge. He fought in some of the bloodier battles of the war, and saw many of its horrors, which led to his creation of a dark story where somebody's hope is crushed and he is powerless to change his future. This could be similar to the position slaves were in, except Lincoln did eventually issue the emancipation proclamation, so the slaves got their own happily ever after ending (which we all know wasn't happy, seeing as they were hated on for a long time after that).

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