man. When Peyton’s body hits the water, therefore, and begins his journey home, the reader is led to believe that the hanging was a failure and the intended victim was able to escape. As the story progresses, Peyton struggles to regain his consciousness while evading capture by Union soldiers. He is determined to reach home, where his wife and children will lovingly accept him.

Throughout his narrative, Bierce has made a point of acknowledging Peyton’s love for his family. As “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” reaches its denouement, Peyton arrives home. Bierce describes the scene as follows:

He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

Peyton’s fall into the creek and escape from captivity and execution is revealed as a dream—the final mental images from the subconscious brain of a man as he passes from life to death.

The entire story leads up to the tragic end where Farquhar dies.  The story wanders rather slowly through different events in his life.  Thus, the story is ultimately a flashback, because Farquhar begins by standing on the scaffold.  The end is where he is actually hanged.  His hanging happens when he is in a dreamlike sequence where he is running towards his home and his wife.  One can assume this to be his most recent memory.

The story ends with the death of Farquhar. The ending comes as a shock, because readers are led to believe that he has escaped.

Farquhar is being executed by Union soldiers for an attempt to destroy a strategic bridge, but the moment he is hanged, he imagines that the rope around his neck has broken, that he falls into the creek below, and that he is able to swim to safety. This escape is made to seem all the more real because of its detail. Farquhar imagines clearly the sensation of drowning, the burning pain in his neck, the desperation of struggling to free his hands. Similarly, the sensation of acute observation once he breaks his bonds and is able to swim to the surface and the eerie way he is able to elude the Union bullets fired at him by diving below the surface of the water have a hyperrealistic quality.

These sensory details make what is being described seem real. What Bierce has done, however, is a clever kind of narrative trick. The narrator has shifted point of view. While the beginning of the story was told from an external point of view, with the facts of Farquhar's execution being clearly and dispassionately described, in part 3, we find ourselves, without warning, inside Farquhar's head, and the narrator's description, written in such a way to seem to match the rest of the story, is in fact a description of Farquhar's mental state at the moment of death. His escape is "flashing before his eyes," a final, desperate delusion.

The ending of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is stunning for its sudden brutality. Just as we think that the protagonist, Peyton Farquhar, is about to succeed in his amazing escape, we learn that none of it actually happened. He never fell through the bridge into the water. He never ran all day and all night to arrive at his home. All this occurred in a matter of seconds in his own imagination. Peyton Farquhar died by hanging just as his executioners intended. In the moments before he died, Peyton Farquhar thought or fantasized that he was escaping. His last thoughts before his neck broke were of successfully returning home.

This is a real twist ending. It forces the reader to examine what is reality and what is imagined. In this way, Ambrose Bierce asks the reader to examine how well reality and fantasy can be told apart. To achieve the effect, Bierce plays with the passage of time and the use of language. Upon first reading the story, we may not notice how he slows time down and speeds it up. This makes the sudden realization that the long escape never happened all the more shocking. However, reading through the final section of the story, we can see clues that nothing is as it appears. Uses of language to describe things, such as "seemed" and "appeared" are employed throughout the escape fantasy.

Ambrose Bierce's story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," includes many vivid details to depict a strong sense of place. The plot is driven by the action of the execution of Peyton Farquhar. The turning point in the story occurs in Section III when Peyton falls downward through the bridge and falls into the water. He tries to make his escape and the soldiers fire at him. In this moment, it seems like he may really get away from the soldiers. The rest of this section shows Peyton struggling through the water and dodging bullets, while moving closer to his home and freedom. 

Although Section III represents a turning point in Bierce's story, it is not entirely accurate since the final scene shows that Peyton is dead and his story about escape was part of a hallucination. Bierce adds a surprise ending, which makes the reader realize that much of the story was not really happening.

The primary character in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce is Peyton Farquhar, and we meet him as he is standing on a plank over Owl Creek with a noose around his neck. He does not appear to be a vicious man or a hardened criminal; in fact, he is quite the opposite. He is about 35 years old and is dressed in the clothing of a gentleman farmer or planter. He is a civilian and his expression is "kindly," which is rather surprising since he is about to be hanged. He comes from a well respected family, but he is a slave owner and therefore a secessionist. That automatically puts him at odds with the Union Army. 

The only other real characters in the story are the unnamed soldiers who are responsible for Peyton's hanging and death, his wife who we learn virtually nothing about, and his children, whom we never meet. 

The story is set in northern Alabama during the Civil War, so the conditions for the South are not very good. In fact, things are pretty grim. Farquhar is set up by a Federal scout (though Farquhar does not know it), who tells him the Union Army is repairing railroad lines and preparing to attack. The nearest railroad site is the nearby Owl Creek Bridge. But the man warns Farquhar that 

any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged.

As an ardent supporter of the Southern cause, Farquhar does what he should not have done and now he is paying the price. 

The social conditions are still very much pro-slavery, and the white people are fighting what they know is a battle to keep the lives they know. The black slaves are still just property, but that will soon change. Economic conditions are getting worse, and the Yankees have begun to isolate the South, cutting off all supplies by destroying the railroad system. While Farquhar is obviously still doing well, he knows the day will come when he and his family will suffer. 

Bierce was an ardent believer in presenting the horrors and grotesqueness of war, and he does that here through the psychological/emotional torture Farquhar endures.

While he uses the artifice of the "surprise ending" (one of the artistic devices you asked about), he also wants his readers to be quite aware of the power of the mind. Farquhar's mind tells him something that is not true, yet he believes it. He feels as if he has escaped and is free, but he is not. This is not just a literary trick; it is the way our minds can work under duress. 

Above all, Bierce has a bitter and cynical view of life. He wants his audience to be fooled into thinking that this story is going to have a so-called happy ending, but of course it does not. Even worse, he gives us plenty of clues that this story will not end well, yet he presumes that his readers will deceive themselves (much like Farquhar himself) into believing that all will be well.

As I mentioned, the surprise ending is one artistic device in this story. Another is the division of the story into three distinct parts. We get the setting, without much explanation, in the first section. In the second we get the only significant dialogue in the story, as well as the background of Farquhar's current circumstances. 

The third section is full of overblown details, such as "the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass" and "the music of aeolian harps.” This style of writing and description is drastically different, and we should see that what we are reading is neither real nor true. 

We absolutely require the information at the beginning of the story to understand what has happened to Peyton Farquhar at the end of the story.  In the final lines, his neck is snapped by the noose with which he is hanged, and his body swings from the rope beneath the titular bridge.  The first part of the story introduces us to Farquhar's immediate circumstances: that his hands are tied behind his back and that a rope is wrapped around his neck.  We learn in Part I that this man is being hanged, the location of the execution, as well as the thoughts he attempts to focus on as he awaits the fatal drop.  As he tries to think of his wife and family, time seems to slow down.  The intervals between the ticking of the second hand on his watch get longer and longer, and the last line of the section indicates that Farquhar has begun to fall: "The sergeant stepped aside."  Therefore, the board which was supporting Farquhar can no longer support him because there is no weight on the other end.  This helps us to understand, later, that the entirety of Part III was occurring in Farquhar's head and not in reality.

This story was first published in 1890, some 25 years after the end of the American Civil War.  Though the story takes place during the time of the war, and though it presents a Southern plantation owner and secessionist who is wholly devoted to the Southern cause, it does not paint him as pure villain.  In fact, Bierce gives the reader one major way in which to relate to Peyton Farquhar: all he wants is to escape his death sentence and return home to be with his wife and children.  He wants this so much that he actually imagines, in the time it takes him to drop from the bridge into the noose, that he has almost achieved it.  Farquhar isn't presented as particularly villainous at all (any details that would draw attention to his slave-ownership, for example, are left out of the story), but rather, he seems like a pretty normal guy with pretty normal hopes.  Therefore, the story seems to focus, not on the villainy of the South or the horrors of slavery as earlier literature was more apt to do, but on the civilian toll, the other costs, of war.  Bierce almost seems to encourage us to feel sympathetically for Farquhar in the end, his neck snapped by the noose just as he feels he's about to embrace his wife.  Such a position is indicative of the story's relation to its time.  The emotions that ran high during and immediately after the Civil War have had time to cool, and people have become more able to see war, in general, as a real evil.