How Ambrose Bierce’s short story expertly handles third-person point of view
Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” feels surprisingly fresh today, especially considering that it was originally published in 1890. It’s Bierce’s use of point of view (POV) that makes the story interesting well over a century later. So let’s take a look at how the narrative makes use of POV.
(Spoilers ahead, in case you haven’t read the story yet!)
If you read last week’s newsletter on the three points of view in classic fiction, you may recall that I reduced the long menu of options to three core POVs: first, second, and third person.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” with its absence of an “I” narrator, is obviously third-person POV. But not a third-person narrator that stays close to the main character throughout. Let’s take a look at how viewpoint distance is handled.
The distant narrator sets the scene
Here’s the opening line:
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.
The narrator stands at a distance. The “man” doesn’t even have a name yet, let alone any thoughts. That will come later. For now, the narrator sets the scene, meticulously laying everything out for us from a birds-eye view.
Note how the narrator speaks about military matters:
A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body.
I see this as a way for the narrator to build trust with the reader. The details strike me as authentic. I’d even call them authoritative. They make me more likely to embrace the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “poetic faith” that makes us experience the story as real or true, even if we know it was made up.
Another sentence clearly communicates the narrator’s authority:
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. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
This has an almost essayistic authority to it. But then take a look at the moment below where the narrator undermines its own authority:
It did not appear to be the duty of these two men…
And this:
Doubtless there was an outpost farther along.
“Did not appear”? “Doubtless”? The narrator has tremendous power to show us the world of the story, so why strike these notes of uncertainty?
Here’s why: These are ways for the narrator to set limits, subtly establishing boundaries. Otherwise, we might wonder, even subconsciously, why the narrator doesn’t tell us everything. In these two passages, the story is signaling that the narrator’s omniscience will be restricted.
That, in turn, sets up the move into the main character’s viewpoint about 800 words into the story:
The arrangement commended itself to his judgement as simple and effective.
Now, the narrator moves deep into the man’s point of view. And yet, by the last sentence of the first part, where the sergeant steps off the plank that holds the condemned man up, we still don’t know his name.
In fact, the first section gives us almost the full plot of the story. Everything that comes after is either backstory or a massive amplification of the seconds remaining in Peyton Farquhar’s life.
We can learn a lot simply by looking at the structure and how much time we spend on each section.
The shape of the story
Here’s the structure of the story:
- The plot told mostly from outside Peyton Farquhar’s POV (1,057 words)
- Backstory about Peyton Farquhar (482 words)
- Peyton Farquhar’s vision in the split second before death (2,198 words)
I’ve already commented on section 1’s authoritativeness. But I’ll add this: I believe section 1, up until the moment we shift into Farquhar’s POV, takes an almost journalistic approach to establish a sense of objectivity.
That objectivity is then used in section 2 to give us the backstory about Farquhar, establishing how he, a Confederate, wound up being caught by Federal soldiers (FYI: Ambrose Bierce served in the Union Army during the American Civil War).
Note how short and matter-of-fact section 2 is. And how we end with a dramatic plot twist:
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.
Twist! This is worthy of a page turner, and that’s no accident. The narrative makes good use of adventure or military fiction tropes to keep us engaged. And those tropes are about to increase – to the breaking point – in section 3.
Objective reporting, adventure story, and mystical experience
The first time I read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” I didn’t guess that Farquhar died at the end of section 1. So, as the story evolved into a lucky and daring escape, with the rope snapping and Farquhar plummeting into the river, I began to adjust my expectations. Maybe this wasn’t the “objective” military reportage I’d sensed in section 1.
What splendid effort!—what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away…
But then that was tempered by what felt like a realistic depiction of Farquhar’s oxygen-deprived brain seeing the world differently:
He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass.
However, as Farquhar’s escape became more and more audacious, with bullets striking but not stopping him, I remember thinking, “All right, it’s pretty far-fetched, but I’ll enjoy this outdated adventure story for what it is.”
One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
Wait, what? He snatched it out? Then I realized that all this was adding up to something a little…strange:
Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color—that was all he saw.
And then a note of the mystical:
A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of Aeolian harps.
From here on, the narrative becomes more overtly dream-like, with the woods emitting strange voices in a foreign language, and his feet no longer touching – or, at least, feeling – the ground.
Then the narrative shifts into the present tense, a good way to create a feeling of timelessness:
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene—perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine.
By this point, consider how far we’ve come from the authoritative, objective omniscience of the opening and the second section. And then, with an almost cruel swiftness, the narrative pulls out of Farquhar’s vision, zooming back out to the distant narrator’s perspective. Back to objective reality:
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.
The story ends abruptly, as abruptly as the sudden death. But it only feels abrupt because we’ve been given such deep access to the dying man’s final vision, and now the narrator has “zoomed out” again – all the way out to where we began.
The end is the beginning
Consider how this story would work if the narration limited itself to Farquhar’s POV, and we didn’t get the distant view of the scene at the beginning, nor the dispassionate backstory in section 2. The beginning would start with Farquhar reflecting on his situation and the way his execution has been set up. Unless we cut it entirely, we’d have to get the backstory within his POV. And the ending would need to be oblique, leaving us with something like “then all is darkness and silence!”
The power of the authoritative, distant third-person narration is that it allows us to have two levels in the story: 1) the matter-of-fact voice that gives us the believable material world; and 2) the deep-inside-Farquhar’s-mind POV that allows us to experience his fantasy escape and mystical vision right before he dies.
Plus, the distant narrator places bookends at either end of Farquhar’s story, which gives it a satisfying shape.
But you’ve listened enough to me. Now it’s your turn.
Learning from the story with a writing prompt
Here’s a writing prompt to help you use some of the POV techniques in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
Try to replicate the story’s three-part structure but with a different situation. Consider the setting and situation you want to use, making sure that you have a clear conflict baked into the idea.
For example, you could tell a story about a woman who attends her high school reunion, expecting her relationship with her former classmates to have radically changed, only to discover that she quickly slips back into the queen bee role again.
So, using the three-part structure:
- Section 1: Start your story with distant third-person narration that sets up your scene, describing it from the outside objectively while hinting that it will limit its range from going far beyond the main character’s experience. Dip into the main character’s POV.
- High school reunion idea: Describe the reunion in objective detail, setting the scene for the “rules of engagement” at such events, then moving into your main character’s POV.
- Section 2: Shift to backstory to explain how the main character landed in their difficulties.
- High school reunion idea: Flash back to high school to show how she controlled and bullied the other kids around her. Or flash back to when the woman, who’s spent years working to be “a better version” of herself and never attended a reunion before, allows herself to be convinced things will be different now that 20 years have passed since graduation.
- Section 3: Begin the final section by going deep into your main character’s POV and staying there until the twist at the end, when you pull back.
- High school reunion idea: Does your main character trick herself into believing she’s the “good guy,” even as she subtly – and then not-so-subtly – undermines the other people around her, one micro-aggression at a time? See what works for your story.
If you don’t want – or don’t have time – to write a full short story, then spend some time drafting an outline based on the three-part structure, fleshing out how you’d like the story to progress.
After doing the writing exercise, feel free to post a comment on Substack about your experience. What kind of story did you work on? How did replicating the Owl Creek story structure influence the choices you made? Where do you want to take the story next?
I look forward to hearing how your writing experiment goes. And thanks again for reading.
Until next time, happy writing!
