Foreshadowing In An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge

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Knowing how to keep the reader involved in the story is a key component in any writing. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Bierce does an excellent job at capturing the audience’s attention by keeping them on their toes. In order to properly do so, Bierce rigorously uses imagery and foreshadowing in his story.

In the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Bierce heavily used foreshadowing throughout the beginning of the story to give the readers a sense of anticipation for what the character was going to do next. “He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach …show more content…
He used imagery to add to the already existing sense of suspense and to help the read with visualizing the scene in which he is describing. One of his more effective uses of imagery was in part three of the story, when Bierce writes that the protagonist, Peyton Farquhar, is “Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.”
This was a very useful example of imagery because it helped the reader visualize how he swung about and to further depict the scene in general. Another great example is when Bierce described, “The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men,” and how they, “all were commingled and blurred.” I found this to be a prime use of imagery because Bierce took every aspect of the scene and told about how it all was combined in Farquhar's vision.

Bierce was also a Civil War expert who wrote about real life dealing with social issues. In Bierce’s, “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”, he used foreshadowing and imagery to grab the audience’s attention and create suspense in the
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