"Bitter Bierce" Lives up to His Name

Talk about a Debby Downer! Good ol' Ambrose really nailed the Negative Nancy routine in An Occurrence on the Owl Creek Bridge. After the intro, reading this story was a little like watching a horror movie. I knew something bad was going to happen- How could "Bitter Bierce" tell it any other way?- but I wasn't sure when exactly it was going to jump from behind the corner and stab me to death. Evidently, Bierce prefers the trick ending type of slip. (Case in point: Part II's final sentence- an unveiling of the passerby soldier as a Federal scout.)

If you didn't read the Norton Anthology author's bio introduction to this story, maybe you might not have been as wise to his ways, but he gave some clues along the way, generally through the means of grand statements and sarcasm.

Bierce lays out the scene at the Bridge very carefully in the first few paragraphs of the story. He depicts the machine of the military in exact form to the location of the butt of every rifle. But no sooner is the picture painted and he breaks the so-far objective narrative voice with a seemingly tongue in cheek military truism: "Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him" (1477). It's as though he's comparing this grim scene with the niceties of a setting formal tea service for the Queen.

I could tell that our pessimistic author would not provide an escape for the poor planter. He relates Peyton's plight of flat-footedness, or something of the like, which keeps him from assignment in the service of the Union. He describes him as man who "in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war" (1478). Bierce is mockingly applying a little lipstick on that pig. He might as well have said the man was simple, and quick to risk it all for a cause he didn't totally understand.

Bierce didn't just kill this guy. He killed him twice. Not only was the man hung at the bridge, but even in his dying dream state he imagines his escape only to be shot moments before love's embrace. For poor Peyton, it seems the brightness he saw in the world around him, the "revelation" of the "wild" region "he had not known he had lived in" came just a few minutes too late (1482). Bierce probably would have told him not to risk it all just for "an opportunity for distinction". Poor Peyton should have counted his blessings when he didn't have to fight in the first place.

I wonder what was so terrible about lil' Ambrose's childhood that he grew up so bitter.