Home > An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > Something Uncanny: The Dream Structure in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge | Something Uncanny: The Dream Structure in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

In the following essay, Stoicheff analyzes Farquhar's thoughts and actions in terms common to representations of dreams in literature.

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has received more critical attention than any other single work by Ambrose Bierce. This is probably because it combines into one text the best ingredients distributed among much of Bierce's fiction—satire, irony, manipulation of the reader, the exposure of human self-deception, a surprise ending, and a stylistic compression and tautness. It may also be because something of the story still eludes its commentators, leaving a residual and "uncanny" (to use Bierce's convenient term in the text) sense of revelation hovering just beyond one's grasp. Peyton...

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