The problem of violence connected to war shows in Bierce’s book that the exercise of power can sometimes be harmful for the ones that are inferior in terms of hierarchical position. The silence that is floating in the air, the river, the forest, the railway, all these elements receive new relevance for the character as he becomes conscious he is at the very end of his life.
The anger that he feels when he finds out he is going to be hanged has such a great impact upon his psyche that he hurries to close his eyes and think of the persons he cherries most in his life: his wife and children. Thus, Peyton Farquhar, while living the most terrible moments in his life, tries to find a way of escaping the cruel reality and he succeeds in doing it by resorting to his imagination. Ambrose Bierce develops this theme in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, illustrating that war can be a perfect representation of violence not only at the physical level, but also at the psychological one. Obviously, the inner anger and grief that make him act in a negative manner have external or internal causes and, consequently, make him be aggressive and tempted to injure or even kill. Violence represents that inner force which makes the individual react in a negative way and injure physically or mentally the ones around him. Thanks to the existence of remarkable writers such as Ambrose Bierce, we can better understand the changes that have occurred in literature and realize at the same time that short-stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” offered new ways of interpreting reality, showing that new issues such as violence, the impact of civil wars on the psyche of the individual as well as the value of life in a cruel universe, have offered a new perspective over the world. The literary panorama of the late 19th century and of the 20th century reflects the complexity of the contemporary thoughts, the whirlpool of ideas, offering an overall image of the changes that have occurred in the mind of the individual due to several events: the world or civil wars, the social structures threatened by the expansion of the industrialization, as well as the oscillating economy in America. Teacher of English and French Liceul Teoretic “Traian” Deva
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